Brush Correctional Facility
Brush, Colorado
GRW
June 27, 2005
CHEYENNE -- Scarcity of space and a recent sexual misconduct scandal have prompted
state officials to move the 54 prison inmates Wyoming currently houses at
private facilities in Colorado to Texas by the end of the summer. But
by the end of 2007, Wyoming expects to have all of its prisoners housed
within the state's borders, according to Wyoming Department of Corrections
spokeswoman Melinda Brazzale. Brazzale
said a lack of available private prison space in Colorado prompted Wyoming
officials to begin consideration of moving state inmates out of Colorado.
Contributing to the decision were allegations of sexual misconduct between
prison guards and inmates at a private prison in Brush, Colo., where Wyoming
had been housing 38 female inmates. Those inmates have since been moved out
of Colorado.

June 21, 2005 Rocky Mountain News
Three states could pull their inmates from Colorado's private prisons by the
end of the summer, spooked by a recent sexual
misconduct scandal and squeezed by Colorado's own rising prisoner population.
The state's five private facilities house about 2,700 Colorado inmates. They
also contract with three other states - Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming - to
hold prisoners those states can't, due to overcrowding. The private prisons
have lost or stand to lose nearly 400 out-of-state inmates, which would be an
approximately $20,000 per-day hit spread between two Tennessee firms who run
them. State officials say they can fill the gap with 400 Colorado inmates
waiting for prison beds - contradicting warnings the private firms sounded
earlier this year - and suggest that facilities filled only with Colorado
prisoners could prove easier to control. Corrections officials say it's
easier to manage prisoners from one state, because they are all used to the
same rules. Some states, for example allow cigarette smoking or conjugal
visits, which Colorado does not. "It is always easier to manage a single
jurisdiction population," said Alison Morgan, a corrections department
spokeswoman. Later, she said the loss of out-of-state inmates "is not a
bad thing." Officials also have said out-of- state inmates may
have fueled or contributed to two riots in the past decade, including one at
the Crowley County Correctional Facility last July. Washington once sent more
than 200 prisoners to Colorado. The state has moved all but a few to other states,
a Washington corrections official said Monday. Wyoming will move its 54 male
inmates - already down from a high of 300 - from Colorado by summer's end, a
corrections spokeswoman there said. Wyoming has already moved 38 female
inmates from a private prison in Brush, in part because of alleged sexual
misconduct between prison guards and inmates that surfaced in February.
Hawaiian officials are rebidding their contract to house 80 women who are in
Brush. Twenty- one state lawmakers urged their governor in April to move
those inmates "immediately," the Honolulu Advertiser reported.

April 17, 2005 APLawmakers are petitioning Gov. Linda Lingle to
move dozens of female Hawaii inmates out of a Colorado prison where staffers
were allegedly involved in sexual misconduct with prisoners. Twenty-one
members of the Women's Legislative Caucus want Lingle
to increase state monitoring of the Brush Correctional Facility in Colorado
and ultimately move the 80 Hawaii inmates to another facility. House
Judiciary Chairwoman Sylvia Luke, D-Pacific Heights-Punchbowl, said she is
concerned about reports that prison staff may be retaliating against Hawaii
inmates following allegations that guards were involved in sexual misconduct
earlier this year with inmates from Hawaii, Colorado and Wyoming. Kat Brady,
coordinator of the Community Alliance on Prisons, said Hawaii inmates have
faced unfair administrative punishments and had legal records confiscated.
The inmates believe these are examples of retaliatory acts, Brady said. GRW
chief executive officer Gil Walker has said he expects Colorado to increase
its number of inmates in Brush, so the company won't take a financial hit
when Wyoming removes it's inmates. "I don't
think it will hurt us at all," Walker said.

April 14, 2005 Honolulu
Advertiser
Wyoming will remove its women inmates from a privately run Mainland prison
that also houses Hawai'i women inmates, the same prison where staff members
were accused of sexual misconduct involving Hawai'i, Wyoming and Colorado
inmates. Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the
Wyoming Department of Corrections, cited a recent series of problems at the
prison in the decision to remove the Wyoming inmates from the Brush
Correctional Facility in Colorado. Those problems included criminal charges
filed against staff members and the former warden in connection with the
sexual misconduct allegations, and revelations that the prison allowed five
convicted felons to work there because their background checks had not been
completed. Investigations by Colorado state prison officials concluded prison
staff had been involved in alleged sexual misconduct with two Hawai'i
inmates, two Colorado inmates and four Wyoming inmates. Two other members of
the prison staff were charged in an alleged cigarette smuggling ring.

March 24, 2005 AP
Colorado prison officials are reviewing background checks for employees at
five private prisons run by Tennessee companies after discovering that some
employees at one of them had criminal records. State Corrections Department
spokeswoman Alison Morgan said Thursday that five convicted criminals and
three people whose backgrounds "merited further investigation" had
been hired at the Brush Correctional Facility, a privately run women's prison
where several guards face charges of having consensual sex with inmates and
smuggling tobacco into the facility. Morgan said a former warden for GRW
Corp., a Brentwood, Tenn.-based company that has held a state contract to run
the prison for 18 months, failed to complete background checks for some
employees. The failure was first reported by KCNC-TV of Denver. She said it
appears that fingerprints for the guards that were sent to the Colorado
Bureau of Investigation were smudged or otherwise unreadable. The prints were
sent back to the prison, which did not follow up, Morgan said. Morgan said
the Corrections Department's Private Prisons Monitoring Unit does not have
the staff or funding to regularly conduct its own background checks of
private-prison employees.

March 23, 2005 Rocky
Mountain News
People with criminal records were hired to work at a Brush prison where
several employees are facing charges for allegedly having sex with inmates,
according to a CBS 4 News investigation. The Brush Correctional Facility is a
medium-security prison that holds 250 women. GRW Corp., a private company
headquartered in Tennessee, runs the prison and hired several employees with
criminal records to watch over the inmates, according to CBS 4 News. The
company has fired six employees with criminal histories so far. Four guards
have resigned from the prison, and one has been put on administrative leave.
The warden, Rick Soares, resigned Feb. 18, a month
after the Department of Corrections first received reports of sexual
misconduct. Three prison guards are facing criminal charges for allegedly
having sex with seven inmates. Two other guards and an inmate are accused of
smuggling contraband cigarettes into the facility. The list of the prison
employees with questionable backgrounds includes 28-year-old Angela Gallegos,
CBS 4 News said. A prison guard, she was arrested on a felony charge three
years ago and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment. Heather Henry, 24,
was also hired as a guard. Her record includes arrests for harassment,
domestic violence-assault, violating protective orders and child abuse.
Richard Fairchild, 42, was convicted of domestic violence and violating a
restraining order. Gil Walker, president of GRW, said these are the last
people who should be working in a prison and should have never been hired.
"We don't hire questionable people, and that's the embarrassing
part," Walker told CBS 4 News. Walker said the company never finished
its background checks on potential employees and didn't know their full
histories.

March 10, 2005 Fort
Morgan Times
Morgan County District Attorney Bob Watson filed additional charges Wednesday
in connection with the prison sexual misconduct scandal in Brush. The new
indictments include a charge of unlawful sexual conduct in a penal
institution lodged against a second guard, charges of being an accessory to a
crime against the former warden and charges against another nine current or
former prison employees related to introducing contraband cigarettes into the
prison and conspiracy to commit introduction of contraband. According to
Watson, the new charges are not necessarily all that will result from his
office's ongoing investigation of the GRW-owned private prison. According to
case filings made Wednesday in Morgan County District Court, corrections
officer Fredrick Henry Woller, 32, of Brush is
charged with unlawful sexual conduct in a penal institution, a class five
felony. Specifically, Woller is alleged to have
engaged in sexual conduct with prisoner CristieMaez. Also charged Wednesday was former Warden Richard
"Rick" Soares Jr., 57, of Sterling, who
was allegedly an accessory to the crime of unlawful sexual conduct in a penal
institution, also a class five felony. He is accused of hindering the
investigation. The pair joins corrections officer Russell Rollison,
31, of Brush, who was charged last week with unlawful sexual conduct in a
penal institution. Other charges resulting from the criminal probe to date
regard prison food service and other prison employees allegedly conspiring
with inmates to bring cigarettes into the prison. Cigarettes have been banned
from Colorado penal institutions since 1999. Those charged with introducing
contraband in the second degree, a class six felony, and conspiracy to commit
introduction of contraband, also a class six felony, are: PaniaAkopian, 31, Pisa Tuvale,
35, Annette Cummings, 38, Janice Crockett, 47, and Jeannette Dillon, 38, all
of whom have the Brush Correctional Facility listed as their address; Gail
Guerrero, no age listed, and Maria Ramirez, 46, both of Brush; Charmayne Kalama, 28, of Kapolei, Hawaii, and Stannie T. Muramoto, 46, of
Honolulu, Hawaii. According to Gil Walker, CEO of Tennessee-based GRW, which
owns the 250-bed private prison, an internal investigation uncovered only
consensual sex between the guards and prisoners. Alison Morgan, a state
corrections department spokeswoman, said the DOC investigation revealed at
least some of the sex as having been initiated by inmates. She said inmates
from both Hawaii and Wyoming admitted to initiating the encounters either so they
could be returned home or in an effort to sue the prison. However, a Hawaii
attorney representing two of the inmates has alleged his clients were raped.
The case was referred to DA Watson's office by the state corrections
department's inspector general's office. The Brush prison, which became the
first private prison for women in Colorado, opened in August, 2003. It houses
80 inmates from Hawaii, 73 from Colorado and 45 from Wyoming. Colorado pays
$50 a day to GRW to house its prisoners.

March 10, 2005 The
Denver Channel
The former warden and 10 other people at the privately run Brush Correctional
Facility for Women face felony charges for conduct ranging from having sex
with inmates to smuggling tobacco into the prison. Filings released by
District Attorney Robert Watson show 32-year-old Fredrick Henry Woller faces a felony charge for allegedly having sex
with an inmate. Former warden Rick Soares, 57,
faces charges of being an accessory for allegedly hindering the discovery of Woller's conduct. Earlier this month, two correctional
officers and seven female inmates were charged with several offenses,
including introducing contraband in the form of tobacco. Watson said other
investigations are pending. Soares last month
resigned from Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the 250-bed prison in Morgan
County, after a month-long investigation implicated several officers. The
department's inspector general's staff reported to Watson last month that
three officers had sex with four inmates from Wyoming, two from Colorado and
two from Hawaii. Some of the women alleged they were raped, but investigators
concluded the sex was consensual. Having sex with an inmate is a felony for
guards. The facility became the first private prison for women in Colorado in
August 2003.

March 4, 2005 Star
Bulletin
Female inmates from Hawaii will remain at a privately run women's prison in
Colorado where five officers face sexual misconduct and contraband charges,
Hawaii officials said yesterday. A visit to the prison by state monitors last
month shows Hawaii does not need to transfer its inmates to an alternate
facility, said Richard Bissen, interim director of
Hawaii's Department of Public Safety. "Incidents like this happen at
facilities," Bissen said. "But that place
is being more closely monitored than ever, and the women themselves say they
are safe." Three prison officers had sex with a total of four Hawaii
inmates, two Colorado inmates and one Wyoming inmate, according to Alison
Morgan, a spokesperson for the Colorado corrections department. Two of the
officers have resigned, and a third is on administrative leave.
Investigations show the sex was consensual, said Gil Walker, founder and
chief executive of Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the Brush Correctional
Facility for Women, located in Colorado. One case involved two Hawaii inmates
and a guard, who admitted to engaging in sexual activity in January in the
prison library. Some civil rights advocates argue that there is no such thing
as consensual sex between an inmate and an authority figure. "We have a
law that says it's a felony. It's not consensual when someone is in
custody," said Kat Brady, an advocate with the American Civil Liberties
Union of Hawaii. Myles Breiner, a Honolulu lawyer
who is representing the Hawaii inmates, has said the women were forced to
perform a sex act for Rollison. Morgan said some
Hawaii and Wyoming inmates admitted they believed having sex with the guards
would help them get transferred to their home states, where they would be
closer to relatives.

February 25, 2005 Denver
Post
The warden resigned and five correctional officers at the privately run Brush
Correctional Facility for women face sexual misconduct and contraband charges
in the wake of a criminal probe. Warden Rick Soares
resigned from Tennessee-based GRW, which owns the 250-bed prison in Brush, on
Feb. 18 after a month-long investigation implicated the five officers, said
Alison Morgan, state Department of Corrections
spokeswoman. The warden was not implicated in the wrongdoing. The
department's inspector general's office referred contraband allegations
involving two staff members and one inmate and sexual misconduct allegations
involving three staff members to District Attorney Robert Watson on Thursday.
Three officers who were not named had sex with four Hawaiian inmates, two
Colorado inmates and one Wyoming inmate, Morgan said. Two of the officers
resigned, and a third is on administrative leave pending the outcome of the
criminal case. Some of the women alleged they were raped, but investigators
concluded the sex was consensual, sometimes initiated by inmates, Morgan
said. It's still a felony offense for correctional officers, she said. She
said some Hawaiian and Wyoming inmates acknowledged they had sex with
correctional officers because they believed they would be returned home,
where they would be closer to relatives. Others hoped to file lawsuits
against the prison. Two officers and an inmate were caught sneaking tobacco
into the prison, Morgan said.

Casper
Re-Entry Center
Casper, Wyoming
Community Education Centers
October 19, 2007 Rocky Mountain News
A convicted murderer who fled a work-release program and was captured in
Canada two weeks later has pleaded guilty to an escape charge. Shannon Parazoo, 44, faces up to a 10-year prison sentence. On
Feb. 9, Parazoo and his stepson, Alonzo Durgin, walked away from the Casper Re-Entry Center,
where both inmates were in a work-release program. Along with Parazoo's wife, two of her children and several pets,
they traveled to Montana and then Canada, Parazoo
said. The escape prompted a search that spanned the northwestern U.S. and
Canada. Canadian police arrested the fugitives in British Columbia on Feb.
23.

February 13, 2007 KGWN
TV
Authorities are on the lookout for a convicted murderer who walked away from
a Casper halfway house last week. His name is Shannon Parazoo,
and he's serving a 20- to 30-year sentence for second-degree murder back in
1985. He's also got a conviction for an escape attempt in 1986. Authorities
say he checked out of the Casper Re-entry Center on Friday, but didn't report
to work that night. They realized he was missing Saturday morning. Also
missing is Parazoo's son, Alonzo Durgin, who was at the center for aggravated assault and
aggravated robbery. Durgin left Friday night on a
pass to spend time with his mother, but never returned. Law enforcement
agencies were notified Saturday, but did not notify the public until
yesterday. Bill Palatucci is the spokesman for New
Jersey-based Community Education Centers Incorporated, which runs the center.
He says it appears the staff at the facility followed all the proper policies
and procedures.

October 5, 2005 Casper
Star-Tribune
A 48-year-old man who was on the run for 21 years after escaping from prison
in 1978 has gone missing again, according to a Natrona County Sheriff's
Office report. Thomas Lee Russell was serving a 45-day sentence at the Casper
Re-Entry Center when he apparently left the facility early Monday morning,
according to Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the
Wyoming Department of Corrections. He was due to return to parole status Oct.
10 -- a status he first enjoyed two years ago when his prison sentence on
three burglary charges from the 1970s was commuted. It is not clear how Russell
left CRC, which is operated by a private corrections company out of New
Jersey. He was reportedly present at one head count at the facility and then
later noticed missing, according to Sgt. Mark Sellers of the sheriff's
office.

Crowley County Correctional
Facility
Olney Springs, Colorado
CCA (formerly Dominion)August
25, 2005 Westword
Slow burn: The 2004 Crowley riot caused extensive fire damage. When all hell
broke loose last year at the Crowley County Correctional Facility, a private
prison on Colorado's eastern plains, Vance Adams stayed very, very quiet.
From his cell door, Adams could see prisoners armed with weight bars running
in and out of his unit, smashing windows, busting up plumbing, setting fires
and raiding offices and vending machines. "They looked like they were
having a good time," Adams says. "But I wasn't." After a
confrontation in the yard on July 20, 2004, the understaffed guards evacuated
quickly, leaving the inmates free to rampage for hours, causing millions of
dollars' worth of damage. Adams, serving a five-year sentence on drug and
escape charges, soaked some towels to try to block smoke and tear gas from
his cell. Prison and state Special Operations Response Teams (SORT) arrived
in the unit around midnight and ordered everyone to put their hands on their
heads and crawl backward, face down. When Adams tried to sign the orders to
his cellmate, who is deaf, the officers became more belligerent, he says.
"I screamed back at them, 'My roommate is deaf!'" he recalls.
"They calmed down a little bit, but I guess I wasn't crawling fast
enough." Adams says he was tightly cuffed, dragged by his ankles through
the water flooding the unit, hauled outside and thrown on the grass of the
prison ball field, where he remained until mid-morning. Older prisoners
around him were passing out; others cried out for medical attention after
being sprayed with birdshot, pepper gas or rubber bullets. "When the
SORT officers cuffed me, they broke my wrist," reads the affidavit of
inmate Terry Borrowdale. "They left me cuffed
with a fractured wrist for four to five hours, until I was taken by ambulance
to a hospital in Pueblo.... When I told the SORT officers that I am almost
sixty years old and had no part in the riot, one officer answered, 'This is
what you all deserve for what you have done.'" Bad as the riot was, many
prisoners say they suffered greater injuries from the aftermath of the
disturbance, as officers from the Colorado Department of Corrections and
Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison operator, regained
control. A group of more than eighty inmates is filing a lawsuit against CCA
this week, claiming the company let conditions deteriorate before the riot, then brutalized men who didn't participate in the uprising.
Prisoners claim they were assaulted by officers, shot (with live ammo, in at
least one case) while fleeing burning buildings or trying to surrender,
denied medical treatment, forced to strip in front of female staff and denied
showers for up to a week after the incident. Trial Lawyers for Public
Justice, a Washington-based public-interest group, has joined Boulder
attorney Bill Trine in representing the inmates. The attorneys have obtained
thousands of pages of the state's investigation of the riot and are seeking
access to videotapes made by staff. "There's absolutely no question
about what happened during the riot," Trine says, "and there's a
lot pointing the finger at CCA. They had to get the riot under control, but
what they did afterward was to punish everybody, whether they were involved
in the riot or not." The Colorado DOC's after-action report on the riot
blasted CCA management for ignoring state inspectors' recommendations before
the riot, for inadequate staff training and for pitiful emergency-response
procedures. The report noted that SORT teams fired hundreds of rounds of
buckshot, birdshot and rubber bullets -- as well as slugs, smoke grenades,
"stingballs" and pepper-spray canisters
-- but concluded that "reasonable force was used" to regain control
of the prison. But since that report was released, the DOC has also come
under fire from state auditors for failing to adequately monitor the private
prison. As first reported in Westword last year,
visits by DOC monitors were often shorter than required and suffered from a
lack of followup on critical issues such as poor
food, skimpy portions, chronic staff turnover and abysmal inmate morale
("Going Off," December 23, 2004). Investigative files obtained by
the prisoners' attorneys indicate that DOC and CCA staff received more
warnings from inmates of an upcoming disturbance than previously
acknowledged. One counselor told investigators that several staff members had
turned in reports on the matter but "the administration seemed more
concerned about who the [source] was than about the information on a
potential riot." At the time of the riot, Crowley held 1,122 inmates,
including some from Washington and Wyoming as well as Colorado, but had only
47 employees on duty. Although the riot was triggered by an alleged misuse of
force on a Washington inmate, investigators found that inmates had a wide
array of grievances, from the disparity in treatment of inmates from
different states to rotten food. Investigators sampled the food in the dining
hall and "found it to be of very poor quality and distasteful."
After the riot, prisoners say, they were kicked and struck by guards while
cuffed, dragged face-down through vomit or feces-tainted water, and
threatened with more violence. An inmate named Arnold Wyrick
claims he was denied access to a bathroom, had to defecate in his pants, and
was forced to wear the soiled clothing for eight hours while guards called
him "Mr. Shitty Pants" and asked, "Does the little baby need a
diaper?" The investigative files also indicate that some prisoners
performed heroically during the riot. Inmates in one honor pod repelled
rioters who tried to enter their house and manned a bucket brigade to put out
fires. Afterward, they were shoved into overcrowded cells with no mattresses
or shipped off to more restrictive prisons or county jails. The prison was
locked down for nearly a month after the riot. Recently paroled inmates say
that conditions at Crowley are no better than before, and possibly worse,
with limited access to recreation and to the DOC's monitors. "I rarely
saw a monitor around," says Adams, who's now in a Denver halfway house.
"They'd have us cleaning the place a day before any inspection."
Inmate Oscar Barron, who left Crowley last spring and is now on parole on a
robbery charge, says staff training is still a sore point. "They've got
guys right out of high school and old ladies," he says. "Come on.
Are they going to protect you if something happens?" The DOC did not
respond to questions about its officers' alleged mistreatment of handcuffed
inmates. CCA spokesman Steve Owen hadn't seen a copy of the complaint and
declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. "CCA will
aggressively defend the complaint," he says. "Beyond that, we
believe the most appropriate venue to respond is through proper court filings
rather than by way of public comment." Adele Kimmel, staff attorney for Trial Lawyers for Public
Justice, says her group became involved in the case because of a lack of
"significant reform" in the way CCA manages its four prisons in
southeastern Colorado. "We think the lawsuit is the best mechanism for
holding CCA accountable and preventing future riots," she says.

August 25, 2005 Rocky
Mountain News
Vance Adams had been worried for weeks that something was going to happen at
the Crowley County Correctional Facility, the privately run prison where he
was incarcerated, and on the night of July 20, 2004, those fears were
realized when fellow inmates went wild. First he saw prisoners smashing glass
inside the prison. Then he looked out the window of his cell and saw flames -
one of several blazes lit that night by rioting inmates. "We were
scared," he said. "We didn't know what to do." But as
frightened as he was of marauding inmates, the treatment he and other prisoners
endured at the hands of guards was similarly stressful, he said Wednesday.
Those guards, he alleged, dragged him and another prisoner out of their cell
by their ankles, cinched their wrists tightly with plastic bands, left them
for hours with no water, and told them to urinate in their pants when they
asked to use a restroom. Adams is among 86 current and former inmates of the
Crowley County Correctional Facility in southeast Colorado who have sued its
operator, Corrections Corp. of America. The inmates allege negligence on the
part of prison staff leading up to the riot, use of excessive force during
and after the violent outbreak, and inhumane treatment of prisoners who had
nothing to do with the fracas. Bill Trine, a Boulder attorney representing the
inmates, repeatedly charged Corrections Corp. of America with ignoring
warnings in the days leading up to the riot. For example, he said, the
transfer of 198 inmates from Washington state to Crowley County heightened
tensions. He said that happened, in part, because the out-of-state prisoners
resented the corresponding loss of privileges. Also contributing was
resentment among Colorado prisoners who were paid substantially less for the
work they did - $18.60 a month vs. $60 a month for Washington prisoners.
Trine also made public documents compiled by the state's Office of Inspector
General that showed prison officials were warned in the days before the riot
that trouble was likely. Among the documents was a report from an addiction
counselor who said she had been alerted by inmates that tensions had
escalated and that "people were going to get hurt." The counselor
filed a report with a superior and later told investigators that others also
had alerted prison staff "with information from inmates who told them
that there was going to be a riot." Those warnings, Trine said, were
ignored. "The net result," he said, "was the riot did
occur."

October 13, 2004 Rocky
Mountain News
The staff of the privately operated Crowley County Correctional Facility was
severely undermanned and too undertrained and inexperienced to control
inmates on the evening of July 20, when hundreds erupted into a nightlong
riot. So said the state Department of Corrections in a searing report Tuesday
on the prison in Olney Springs, owned and operated by Corrections Corporation
of America with a contract to house inmates from Colorado and other
states.The prison had a uniformed
staff of only 33 officers for its 1,122 inmates on the evening of the riot, a
ratio of 34 inmates per officer. That compares with a ratio of five inmates
per officer in Colorado's state-operated prisons. Corrections Corporation of
America has not released a damage estimate for the prison, which it owns and
must repair with its own funds. Repairs have not been completed and 30
percent of the prison remains closed. CCA must also reimburse the state
$385,000 for the prison system's Special Operations Response Team and other
state personnel and expenses in quelling the riot. Not even basic prison
operational procedures were maintained at the prison, the report charged. The
prison had failed to satisfy state prison officials' demands to create an
emergency plan or maintain an emergency response team, the report stated. On
the night of the riot, the prison was "not fully staffed," and some
of its staff had been "on the job for two days or less." Once the riot erupted, chaos
reigned. Prison supervisors reported that the entire staff was accounted for,
although two corrections officers were trapped inside the prison and sought
safety in a segregation cell. The female librarian was stranded in the
library with 37 inmates, who did not join the riot. A
private prison corrections officer's pay is about two-thirds that of state
prison officers - $1,818 per month, compared with $2,774 per month, and staff
turnover is about twice the rate as in state prisons. CCA has told the state
it maintains an approximately 8-to-1 inmate to corrections officer ratio, but
it was far off that staffing strength on July 20. CONCLUSIONS • Turnover:
High staff turnover and inexperience hampered response to emergencies. •
Staff: Prison was not fully staffed at the time of the riot, and some
employees had been on the job only two days or less. • Response: Prison
staff's response to the initial incident was indecisive and failed to comply
with orders from a state Department of Corrections official. • Drills:
Emergency drills were rarely conducted. Prison staff failed to maintain a
recommended percentage of emergency response team members. • Prisoners:
Prison staff did not respond to inmate grievances in a timely manner. •
Security: Fundamental security measures were not consistently followed.

October 13, 2004 Pueblo
ChieftainAdministrators of the privately run Crowley County Correctional Facility
knew or should have known about potential problems that led to a July 20
inmate riot, a new report revealed Tuesday. The Colorado Department of
Corrections report on the riot said the 1,130-inmate facility, one of five
private prisons in the state, lacked state-required equipment, failed to
follow DOC regulations at times, had insufficiently trained guards and no
adequate plan to deal with crisis situations. The 179-page report to Gov.
Bill Owens revealed that: Prison management failed to comply with
deficiencies and recommendations that DOC inspectors told them about before
the riot. High staff attrition and inexperience contributed to a lack of
ability to respond to emergencies. The prison failed to adhere to
DOC-mandated menus. Fundamental security measures were not consistently
followed. Construction materials used to build cells were too easily
destroyed. The prison's initial response to the riot was indecisive. The
report noted that the riot, which left scores injured but no deaths, was
sparked by a number of factors, at least one of which was not the fault of
the prison operators. Because the prison housed inmates from other states -
Wyoming and Washington - there was a disparity in the monthly wage
out-of-state inmates earned over Colorado prisoners." Buying power is strongest,
therefore, among Washington and Wyoming inmates," according to the
report, written by DOC prisons director Nolin Renfrow,
legislative liaison Cherri Greco and prisons operations manager Anna Cooper.
Additionally, in the six months before the riot, DOC inspectors - known as
the private prison monitoring unit - cited numerous issues with the prison
operators, including food preparation programs, accuracy and timeliness of
reports and inadequate tracking of security threat intelligence. At
one point during the riot, Renfrow ordered the
prison to use chemical agents to disperse the inmates, but the prison delayed
doing so because it was seeking approval from its corporate headquarters in
Nashville. The report also revealed that the prison's level of emergency
preparedness was lacking in several areas: It wasn't fully staffed. Some
employees had been on staff for two days or less when the riot broke out.
Because it had not developed an emergency preparedness plan to DOC standards,
some prison guards and managers were unsure what to do. It rarely conducted riot drills.
When one was conducted, a staff member unaware that a drill was under way
"drew a weapon" on an inmate, the report said. "The prison
riot of July 20 at the Crowley County Correctional Facility began with a
disturbance which, in retrospect, was not responded to as quickly and
efficiently as possible, thus developing into a riot. Some dynamics among the
inmate population, perception that inmate complaints were not being heard,
and use of force by CCCF staff likely all contributed to the onset of the
incident."

September 22, 2004 Pueblo
Chieftain
Part of the problem in managing rioting inmates at a private prison in
Crowley County in July was that the facility had a 45 percent turnover rate
in employees, state corrections officials told lawmakers Tuesday. A day after
a Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman told The Pueblo Chieftain
that DOC doesn't routinely track employment matters at private prisons, the
DOC's director of prisons, Nolin Renfrow, told the
legislative Joint Budget Committee that one of the things under investigation
is the prison's high turnover rate. DOC wants to know if that high rate contributed to the
riot among 500 inmates July 20 at the Crowley County Correctional Facility in
Olney Springs, which is operated by Corrections Corp. of America. "We
know that it was 45 percent at this particular facility," Renfrow told the six-member panel that requested a review
of DOC's investigation of the riot. "Over the past few years, we have
monitored their turnover as a whole. I think ours is around 8 to 10 percent.
I think they have averaged 20 to 25 percent turnover in the past few years
across CCA (in the state)." At one point before he
arrived at the Crowley prison, Renfrow said he
ordered staff workers to spray crowd-controlling chemicals into the main yard
where many prisoners were rioting. "The word we received back (after
giving the order) was that CCA was trying to get authorization to do that
from their headquarters," Renfrow said.
"Over the next two to three hours, I continued to repeat my orders as I
was driving to the facility from Colorado Springs. Eventually, when our staff
arrived, we did do that and the inmates were brought under control."
"The (high turnover rate) generally means that tenured staff is
generally low, and when tenured staff is very low, sometimes they have
difficulties dealing with situations that are not typical of everyday
operations." He said CCA's policy in dealing with riots is to "stand
down and wait" for DOC officials to arrive to handle it. "I'm
really concerned with what the counties are going to have to do with private
prisons, what's expected of them and whether or not they really know what
they're getting into when they get into a private prison situation,"
said Sen. Abel Tapia, D-Pueblo, who sat in on the briefing. "I know that
(DOC) has the ability to get a team together to react to a violent situation.
Shouldn't private prisons have that same capability to control their own facility?"
Renfrow agreed, saying one of the recommendations
he expects to make to the governor is to ensure that private prison guards
are better trained and equipped to handle riots.

September 21, 2004 Pueblo Chieftain
Colorado Department of Corrections officials don't routinely keep records of
staffing levels, turnover rates or salary information for private prisons
housing state inmates, says DOC spokeswoman Alison Morgan. The staffing
issues were raised following a July 20 inmate riot at Crowley County
Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, where 400 to 500 prisoners held
control at the prison for five hours, until DOC and law officers from several
local and state agencies used tear gas and rubber pellets to regain control
of the medium-security prison run by Corrections Corp. of America. Following
the riot, The Pueblo Chieftain questioned Morgan about the private prison's
staffing ratio, number of uniformed staffers on duty when the riot began and
salary ranges for CCA employees. Morgan replied: a..
CCA's uniformed staff-to-inmate ratio was 1 to 7.9, while DOC's average
staff-to-inmate ratio is 1 to 4.7.b.. CCA had 33 uniformed staffers on duty when the riot
began and the prison housed 1,125 inmates at the time. c..
A Crowley County correctional officer's pay averages $1,818 per month plus
benefits. d.. DOC's monthly beginning correctional
salary is $2,774, plus state benefits; (no average was given). Morgan
provided the information to The Chieftain on July 23. But when private prison
critic Ken Kopczynski of the Private Corrections Institute Inc., asked Morgan
in August for the same information, along with some backup information such
as shift logs, Morgan told Kopczynski that DOC did not have information on
the staffing levels at the time of the riot, annual turnover rates or average
salary ranges. Staff longevity was raised, according to Kopczynski, because
one female Crowley employee stated on television that she was working in the
central control center despite being on the job for only two days. Morgan,
asked Monday about the discrepancy in her responses to Kopczynski and The
Chieftain on staffing issues, said she obtained responses for The Chieftain
in July from CCA, but added that DOC does not routinely keep staffing or
other information on the Crowley prison as part of its ongoing monitoring of
CCA. The reason, she said, is that DOC's contract with CCA requires the
company only to maintain sufficient staffing; no specifics are spelled out.

August 8, 2004
As inmates at Crowley County Correctional Facility grew restless and agitated
in the exercise yard on the evening of July 20, officers of the private
company charged with managing the prison withdrew to regroup. "They
ran," said inmate Robert Horn, serving five years for passing bad
checks. "They just abandoned the place." All but one.
As a peaceful protest devolved into arson and riot over five hours, prison
librarian Linda Lyons kept sole watch over 37 male inmates. Although she
radioed her location, her supervisors from the private Corrections
Corporation of America made no move to retrieve her. They then failed to
notify an elite anti-riot team from the Department of Corrections that she
had been left behind. While up to 500 inmates in a prison full of 1,100
killers, rapists, thieves and drug dealers brought their riot within one
building of the library, Lyons was never harmed. She said the men with her
talked, played chess and stayed clear of the melee while she maintained a
calm demeanor. "Showing fear would have upset the inmates,"
Lyons said. A Department of Corrections review of Colorado's most
destructive inmate uprising has found that the official response was dogged
by slow decision-making and a lack of communication. A senior department
official said CCA officials failed to respond promptly and with enough force,
ignored an offer to negotiate, then left the librarian behind as they
retreated to safe positions. Beyond the questions about the response,
inmates and a corrections officer from CCA say the company's managers had
also failed to heed weeks of warnings about growing inmate unrest. That
unrest - over such typical inmate complaints as poor food, inequitable
treatment of prisoners and a lack of access to prison officials - blossomed
into a riot after corrections officers disciplined one unruly inmate.
Officials with CCA, which manages the Crowley County prison through a
contract with the department, dispute much of the department's criticisms.
They insist they mounted an organized response to the rebellion, deployed
chemical agents promptly and never ignored inmate grievances or a request
that night to see the warden. On the contrary, said spokesman Steve Owen,
company officials tried to negotiate an end to the uprising before the riot
but were forced to withdraw as inmates grew increasingly angry.
"If there are things we didn't do right, we're going to own up to
it," Owen said. "We're going to fix all that." The
company has already placed one Crowley County captain on administrative leave
because his statements about the riot were "very inconsistent,"
Owen said Saturday. "There is a concern about the truthfulness of
his statement," he said. The department's investigation is not yet
complete, but interviews with inmates, department officials and a guard at
the prison provide an outline of the events that nearly killed one inmate and
left the prison smoldering and partly uninhabitable. Inmate allegedly
beaten In the weeks before the riot, about 200 inmates from Washington state
had been moved to Crowley County as CCA sought to maximize profits by filling
every bed. At 10 a.m. the day of the riot, one of the Washington inmates
refused to go to work, according to the department's director of prisons,
Nolin Renfrow. When the inmate struggled with
an officer taking him to a disciplinary unit, several officers jerked the
inmate to the ground, said inmate Fredrick Morris, 47, who is serving a life
sentence for murder. Horn also witnessed the inmate's treatment.
"These other guards started pummeling him and kicking him," Horn
said. "We'd just had enough, you know? To treat someone like an animal
is not going to fly anymore." CCA and the department are both
investigating the complaint about the alleged beating of the inmate, whose
name was not released. The department's inspector general says a videotape of
the incident does not appear to show excessive force. But neither the
department nor CCA has reached a conclusion on whether the corrections
officer went too far. Inmates thought he did. The boiling point CCA is a Tennessee-based for-profit corporation
with contracts to manage prisons and jails across the United States,
including four here. Colorado pays the company $49 per inmate per day and
requires the company to comply with all state and federal rules for inmate
care. The company and its supporters say they can profit from
incarceration by employing efficient techniques lost on state
bureaucracies. Inmates at Crowley County said that quest for profit
went too far at the prison. Morris, who had worked as a cook at the
prison, said he quit his job of three years because of the facility's poor
food preparation practices. Staff were ordered to
grind hot dogs for spaghetti sauce, use muffin mix in meatloaf, combine
instant potatoes with pinto beans for burritos and put pork in soup intended
for Jewish inmates, Morris said. He said he complained about the
practices to a CCA supervisor in March but nothing happened. "The
food has gotten worse," Morris said. CCA officials said they had
received no formal grievances about the food. The most recent inspection by
the department, on June 29, found that the food served to inmates at Crowley
County was considered "good" by department standards in nearly
every category. In volunteer prison surveys for the department, Crowley
County inmates in October rated food they received to be lower in quality
across the board than prisoners at department prisons. But Owen said
CCA by contract serves the exact same menus as the department.
Prisoners have not filed any grievances about food quality, he said.
Inmates had a variety of other complaints against Crowley County.
Colorado inmates were upset that they were paid only 60 cents a day for doing
the same work as inmates transferred to the prison from Washington a week
earlier. Washington pays inmates $3 per day for work, and CCA is bound by
contract to follow Washington policies when keeping that state's inmates,
Owen said. Colorado lets CCA pay local inmates less. All of that boiled
over July 20. A Crowley County correctional officer said inmates had been talking
for weeks about an uprising. "I was told about it," said the
officer, whose name is being withheld. "They said it wasn't going to be
more than two months, at the most. It wasn't even that long. I was told this
by several different inmates." "They took off
running" On the night of July 20, correctional officers opened a
gate connecting the east recreational yard with the west about 7 p.m. so
inmates could play softball in the west yard. Instead of a handful,
hundreds streamed into the west yard, said inmate Terry Poole, serving life
for kidnapping. Several Washington inmates asked correctional officers
to speak with Warden Brent Crouse about their grievances, Renfrow
said. Crowley County security chief Richard Selman said he never heard
about the requests. Owen, the CCA spokesman, said the company's investigation
has determined that an inmate asked to speak with a "supervisor" -
not the warden. After the request was relayed to supervisors, a shift
captain was unable to locate the inmate who made the request, Owen said. At
that point, the captain became concerned for the safety of the prison staff
and they withdrew from the yard - effectively relinquishing control to the
inmates. "They took off running, and they left the female
employees behind," said William Morris, another Crowley County
Correctional Facility inmate. CCA reported the prisoner rebellion to
department officials, and Renfrow said he urged CCA
to immediately use chemical agents to push inmates away from the living units
and put down the uprising. But, Renfrow said,
CCA officials told department monitors that they needed approval from their
Nashville headquarters before deploying tear gas. CCA spokesman Owen
says the company's officers did not need approval from Nashville and did
respond promptly. In a written response to questions, he said "chemical
agents had already been disbursed by facility staff at approximately 8:20
p.m." That would be before Renfrow said he
asked for its use. Regardless of when the first gas was used, it came
much later than inmates expected and gave ringleaders an opportunity to
organize real mayhem. "If they would have just went back, sat on
the towers and shot tear gas from up there, there probably would have been
less of a riot," William Morris said. "Everybody would have went home. They would have dispersed."
Librarian kept her cool As inmates began setting the prison facilities
ablaze, librarian Lyons, 56, ordered the men in the
library back to their cells. They implored her not to force them out into the
yard, where other inmates were clearly gearing up for a fight. Before
long, fires were burning in front of each living unit and the greenhouse was
burning. In the yard, scores of inmates used filing cabinets and doors as
shields as they approached officers. They barricaded doors with soda
machines they lit on fire. Unbreakable windows were blown out, and inmates
were using shards of glass as shanks. The amount of damage still has not been
calculated, but it may approach $1 million. Renfrow
said he asked CCA if all employees had made it safely out of the
prisoner-controlled grounds. He said he was mistakenly told they had.
If he had known Lyons was still in harm's way, he said, he would have
immediately ordered officers to get her. Inmates broke into the shop next to
the library, said Nathan Walter, commander of the department's Special
Operations Response Team, or SORT. Still, Lyons, a second-year CCA
employee, didn't fret, and she said she is not upset with CCA for failing to
dispatch a team to rescue her. In her mind, she didn't need rescuing.
"I felt safe where I was," she said. It was 10 p.m. before
the SORT team had moved in to retake the first of the dorms. Outnumbered by
dozens of prisoners to each one, SORT members used rubber pellets and
"triple chaser" tear gas bundles that separated and exploded to
push back inmates who were hurling rocks, sticks, furniture and flaming
Molotov cocktails. In the aftermath, they learned that while Lyons was
unharmed, a group of as many as 15 inmates had gone on the prowl in the
prison to attack sex offenders and men suspected of being snitches. The man
hurt worst during the riot, burglar Rudy Lujan, was attacked by a mob of
maybe 15 inmates who believed he had snitched on inmates to the guards, Horn
said. They beat him, stabbed him, threw him over the railing of the
second-floor tier of cells and tossed a microwave oven onto his limp
frame. He was hospitalized in critical condition, and officials have
not offered an update since. The prison can be repaired, but if CCA's
policies don't change, it will happen again, Horn predicted.
"Those people (in Olney Springs) need to understand that this is going
to occur over and over again," he said. "The population in that
area is seriously lucky. At any point, (the inmates) could have just turned
to that fence and mowed that fence down. Imagine five or six hundred crazed
individuals running into Olney Springs." (Denver Post)

August 4, 2004
Family members of inmate Rudy Lujan sat around his mother's dinning room table recently, looking at pictures from his
childhood and worrying about his well-being now. Oh, the stories
Juliana Lujan has about her 32-year-old son who was beaten nearly to death
after a riot broke out two weeks ago at the Crowley County Correctional Facility
east of Pueblo. Rudy Lujan of Greeley is still hospitalized from the
injuries. His parole hearing is today. Lujan was stabbed, beaten with a
cinder block and forced to jump from the second floor by a gang of men on
July 20 when inmates rioted, torched and broke pipelines that flooded the
prison. Juliana said in the past year her son has repeatedly asked for
protection, but no one took the convicted felon seriously. He told his family
that he had been jumped, "cheap-shotted"
from behind and threatened several times. He was at an undisclosed
hospital in Pueblo where guards watched over him as he recovered from a coma,
a bruised body, blackened eyes, stiff neck, several stab wounds and carnage
torn from his arm by the cinder block beating. It took him nearly dying to be
taken seriously, Juliana said. Lujan was recently moved to an infirmary, she
said. (Greeley Tribune)

July 30, 2004
More than two dozen Airway Heights inmates currently
housed at a Colorado corrections facility will remain there until the Washington
State Department of Corrections completes its investigation into last week's
riot. Criteria for selecting inmates to send out of state include time
left to serve, health issues, behavior and how often they are visited by
relatives. Ultimately though, the private out-of-state prisons get to choose
which inmates it wants to bring in. (KXLY News 4)

July 29, 2004
For more than two hours, Tammera Bravo's son, an
inmate at Crowley Correctional Facility, delivered "minute-by-minute
terror" over the phone as prisoners smashed their surroundings.
"He said, 'It's on Mom. Those prisoners from Washington are refusing to
come out of the yard.' " Washington inmates at
the private prison in Olney Springs, about 80 miles southeast of Colorado
Springs, had reached a boiling point because of their recent transfer and
because they didn't like their new cells, Bravo said. Five and a half
hours later, it was over. All in all, as many as 400 of the prison's more
than 1,100 inmates had been involved. Two of five cellblocks were trashed, at
least one control room had been breached, fires had burned, and 13 inmates
were injured. Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Tallahassee,
Fla.-based Private Corrections Institute -- which has been extremely critical
of privatized prisons -- said the transfers hurt inmates' ties to family and
friends. Many families, he said, are too poor to afford regular visits and
inmates are left with little to look forward to and no life outside prison
walls. Kopczynski says it was no coincidence that, a day after the
Crowley County prison incident, 28 Colorado inmates rebelled at a CCA private
prison in Tutwiler, Miss., setting fire to mattresses and clothing.
"You're importing inmates from Washington and Wyoming to Colorado, and
then you're shipping Colorado inmates off to Mississippi," Kopczynski
said. "Does anyone see the irony here?" In 2002, former state
Sen. Penfield Tate, as he had in years prior, introduced unsuccessful
legislation that would have prevented Colorado inmates from being transferred
out of state. Tate became worried after incidents occurred in the 1990s
similar to the one in Crowley County. "We've seen a history of
it," Tate said. At CCA-owned private prisons, the guard-to-inmate
ratios are far lower than at state-operated Department of
Corrections facilities. The state's average ratio is one guard for
less than five inmates, while the for-profit CCA averages one guard for
nearly eight inmates. Morgan said the vast difference in ratios is justified
because the state tends to deal with more difficult inmates. However,
critics like Kopczynski note that salaries for private prison guards tend to
be much lower. At the Crowley County prison, guards make an average of $1,818
a month, compared to state guard salaries that start at $2,774 a month.
Because private prisons tend to pay guards less, companies grapple with
higher turnover, meaning fewer experienced guards are available to handle
complex inmate issues, Kopczynski said. Some guards, he said, don't last long
enough to complete their training, which can take months. Others stay just a
few years, he added. (Colorado Springs Independent)

July 29, 2004
The state Department of Corrections will accept no more out-of-state
prisoners at Colorado's four private prisons while an investigation unravels
the cause of a riot at one of them, an agency spokeswoman said Tuesday.
(Rocky Mountain News)

July 28, 2004
State Sen. Ken Kester on Tuesday defended the
private operators of Crowley County Correctional Facility, rocked by a riot
last week. Kester, R-Las Animas, questioned
statements made by Rep. BuffieMcFadyen,
D-Pueblo West, in the wake of a riot that caused major damage to the prison,
and praised Corrections Corp. of America, which operates Crowley and three
other private prisons in the state. The day following the riot, McFadyen told The Pueblo Chieftain her attempts to
require the state to reveal the actual state cost of housing prisoners at
private prisons was rejected during the latest term of the Legislature.
She said that on three different occasions, she asked for a breakdown of the
cost - not just the per diem rate paid to private prisons, but also cost for
medical care for inmates, transportation, escapes, riot control, case
management and some training of private prison staff, which the state
pays. "I am not trying to be belligerent. I am just trying to
assess the information in a format that can be compared side-by-side with the
state numbers. If that information is available it has not been made
available to me," McFadyen said. Kester defended private prisons, saying that they save
the state an estimated $50 million in construction costs per private prison,
and it also costs taxpayers less to maintain inmates in private
prisons. Kester, who was a Bent County
commissioner when the county negotiated a deal with CCA for the Bent County
Correctional Facility, said that the Bent County prison has been helpful to
the community. (Pueblo Chieftain)

July 27, 2004
A riot that injured more than a dozen inmates and caused millions of dollars
in damage to a prison run by a Tennessee company last week prompted the state
to temporarily stop accepting out-of-state inmates, an official says.
(AP)

July 25, 2004
Staffing and pay at the Crowley County private prison, where inmates rioted
Tuesday night, is roughly half of that at state prisons, a Department of
Corrections spokeswoman said Friday. The DOC's Alison Morgan worked
with the Crowley prison owner, Corrections Corp. of America, to produce the
statement in response to questions submitted by The Pueblo Chieftain.
CCA's uniformed staff-to-inmate ratio is 1-7.9. DOC's average staff-to-inmate
ratio is 4.7-1. She noted that DOC's ratio is affected by the needs in DOC's
high-custody facilities and special-needs inmates. CCA has based its
salaries on the Crowley County area's prevailing wages. The range for a
correctional officer at Crowley County is $1,557 to $2,335 a year, with an
average of $1,818 per month plus benefits. DOC's beginning salary for a
correctional officer is $2,774 per month, plus state benefits. No average
figure was stated. Colorado, like most states, participates in the
Federal Interstate Compact Agreement that provides for the exchange of
inmates between states. "For example, if DOC has an inmate that cannot
be incarcerated in a Colorado facility, we can transfer that inmate to an
accepting state. We then must accept an inmate from that state in
exchange." It was not clear whether DOC reviews the backgrounds of
prisoners before they're accepted into the state's private prisons.
Crowley County had 33 uniformed staffers on duty when the riot began Tuesday
night. The prison housed 1,125 inmates, according to DOC officials.
There have been reports that Crowley staffers feared there would be strife
with the arrival of Washington state inmates. Ninety-nine Washington inmates
arrived on July 2; another 99 on July 9. (Pueblo Chieftain)

July 25, 2004
Details of a sexual harassment lawsuit settlement between an Edmond company
that once operated a Colorado private prison and three women who used to work
there aren't being released. The women, former guards, filed the
federal lawsuit seeking more than $10 million from Dominion Correctional
Services and three managers. The former guards alleged that female
employees were coerced numerous times in 2001 and 2002 into sexual activity
by male managers who condoned sexual misconduct among workers. Former
guard LucillaGigliotti
alleged that she became pregnant after the prison's former chief of security,
Ronald McCall, went to her home and raped her. McCall, in court
filings, denied he sexually assaulted her and denied he "engaged in any
conduct which violated the constitutional rights" of Gigliotti
and the other two women, Pamela Johnson and Lt. Jennifer Stalder.
McCall had been forced from a previous job at the Colorado Department of
Corrections because "he had an extensive history of engaging in sexual
discrimination and harassment," the three women alleged. Johnson
alleged a guard raped her at the prison despite her having previously pleaded
with Vigil not to assign the guard and her to the same work area. (AP)

July 23, 2004
A man who suffered the worst injuries during Tuesday's riot at the Crowley
County Correctional Facility called his sister after fires broke out, saying
he feared for his life and that she should call police. Rudy
Lujan, 32, who is serving time for burglary and drug charges, had to shout
because the commotion in the private prison was so loud, said his sister, who
would give only her first name, Bonnie, citing fear of retaliation.
"He said a riot was going on, and all the guards were so scared they
went on the roof," she said. "The prisoners had already taken
control. He was scared. He told me, 'If anything happens to me, tell everybody
I love them."' A prison official called Lujan's family in Greeley
on Wednesday to tell them that he had been hospitalized with multiple stab
wounds, said his other sister, Debbie Segura. On Thursday, prison officials
reported that Lujan was breathing on his own and was in serious but stable
condition, according to the family. Lujan had been having problems with
gang members in the private prison in Olney Springs, his family said. He had
told them stories of being jumped from behind and "cheap-shotted" more than once. His family believes
Lujan had been refusing gang members' attempts to recruit him. (Denver
Post)

July 23, 2004
Prison officials at the Crowley County Correctional Facility foresee a
complex repair project after the prison was rocked by a riot Tuesday night.
The prison is one of four in the state owned and operated by Corrections
Corp. of America. At least one-third of its 1,147 inmates rioted Tuesday and
two of the five housing units were rendered uninhabitable. Inmates set
three fires, damaged three other living units and destroyed the vocational
greenhouse. They also smashed furniture and televisions, destroyed
desks and bunks, ripped sinks and toilets from the walls and intentionally
triggered fire alarms to drench everything in the buildings. (Pueblo
Chieftain)

July 23, 2004
Inmates at the Crowley County prison began telling their families as long as
a month ago that tensions at the facility were high and that an uprising was
imminent, two parents said Thursday. One Denver mother said her son
told her that in early June word began to spread that the Crowley County
Correctional Facility was going to accept prisoners from Washington state.
When the imported inmates began arriving about three weeks ago, several
inmates began complaining to the guards, she said. Colorado inmates
complained that some of the out-of-state prisoners were being mixed in with
them, which was creating a lot of tension, she said. Residents and officials
from nearby Olney Springs said guards who visit the town's businesses or live
in the community had told them in recent weeks that they expected violence at
the prison. (Rocky Mountain News)

July 23, 2004
Although state lawmakers have carried out four audits of state prison
programs since 1999, they have never audited the private company in charge of
the southern Colorado prison engulfed by a riot Tuesday. The Crowley
County prison that erupted in flames is run by Corrections Corporation of
America. A state senator said Thursday the state might want to take a closer
look at its finances. "We can follow the state's money and audit
that," said Sen. Norma Anderson, R-Lakewood, a longtime audit committee
member. "Perhaps we should do more along that line. We have looked at
the bank accounts for the prisoners that are held in the private prisons, but
we have never audited security there." No one could estimate the
damage from Tuesday's melee, but state officials insisted those costs would
be borne by CCA. The state also intends to bill the company for its
costs in rushing more than 100 correctional officers and other help to the
scene to help quell the uprising, as well as the expense of the investigation
- a cost that could run as high as $150,000. And at a news conference
in Pueblo, Frank Smith of the anti- private prison group Private Corrections
Institute said that "Olney Springs came apart at the seams, and it was
no big surprise." Smith, along with Brian Dawe,
executive director of Corrections U.S.A., a nonprofit group that represents
the nation's public corrections officers, said private prisons do not protect
the public. "This isn't about public safety for the private
prisons, it's about the money," Dawe
said. Smith said he talked to some of the corrections officers at
Crowley and they expressed concerns about understaffing, low pay and
inadequate training. Dawe said private prison
guards receive 30 percent less training than those at federal
facilities. Smith said he was also told that Colorado prisoners might
have started the riot because they were not happy about what they considered
special treatment that prisoners from Washington state were receiving. Dawe, a former prison guard, said moving inmates out of
state and away from their families is bad for the prison and the public.
"I guess Colorado doesn't have enough problems, so they need to import
some more," he said. (Rocky Mountain News)

July 22, 2004
After an inmate's being denied a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich helped
sparked a riot at the medium-security Crowley County Correctional Facility in
1999, state prison officials concluded that guards at the private prison had
not been properly trained. John Suthers, head
of the Colorado Department of Corrections at the time, later vowed that the
state's future contracts with private prisons would emphasize "proper
training." Five years later, after another riot at the prison - now run
by a different company, Corrections Corp. of America - some critics are
raising the training issue again, though DOC officials say they don't believe
it's a problem. "The people that they're getting employed there - people
who have never been in law enforcement, people who have never been in
corrections - they put them through a training period that they say is
effective, but it's not," former Crowley County correctional officer
Jennifer Stalder said Wednesday. "You're
dealing with felons, and they don't play." Stalder
recently settled a wrongful-termination suit against Dominion Correctional
Services, which ran the prison before CCA. Stalder
never worked for CCA, but she has friends and relatives who work there who
have told her the training programs have not changed, she said. And
though some wondered Wednesday if state budget cuts could have led to
Tuesday's riot, that is unlikely, said Republican Rep. Brad Young of Lamar,
chairman of the legislature's Joint Budget Committee. But Rep. BuffieMcFadyen, D-Pueblo, said
she's concerned that privately run prisons aren't cheaper than state-run
prisons. She points out that the costs for medical care, transportation,
clothing, case management, escapes and riot control all fall back on state
and local government. (Denver Post)

July 22, 2004
State Department of Corrections officials said Wednesday that Tuesday's
Crowley County prison riot began with 100 to 150 inmates refusing to return
from a recreational yard to their housing unit. As a result of damage
from the uprising, more than half the inmates have been moved
elsewhere. The Olney Springs prison is privately operated by
Corrections Corp. of America, but state employees of the DOC and officers
from several area sheriffs' departments helped bring the riot under control
about five hours after it began. DOC officials said the investigation
of the cause of the riot is ongoing. Department spokeswoman Allison Morgan
said, "one factor may be gang-related," but Executive Director Joe
Ortiz said later, "We have no special information that this is
gang-related." Morgan said the riot began at 7:30 p.m., turning
into a scene of mayhem as inmates used weight-lifting equipment to tear up
housing units. They started three fires, leaving two of the prison's five
housing units uninhabitable from fire and water damage and another unit
damaged. Other property was damaged or destroyed, and there were a few
instances of inmates attacking one another. CCA staffers retreated
until the DOC special operations team and emergency response teams from five
state prisons arrived. Backup officers from Pueblo, Fowler, Rocky Ford and
the Colorado State Patrol also were sent to assist with the crisis. DOC will
put a moratorium on transferring out-of-state inmates into Crowley County for
now. (The Pueblo Chieftain)

July 22, 2004
A Colorado lawmaker whose district includes eight state-run prisons said
Wednesday the riot at the private Crowley County facility raises critical questions
about the safety and cost-effectiveness of private prisons. Rep. BuffieMcFadyen, D-Pueblo West,
said she was alarmed when she first got word of the rioting and the
possibility that inmates and guards might have been seriously hurt or
killed. She intends to press her colleagues during the 2005 session to
take a much closer look at the state's contracts with private prisons.
She had raised the alarm on the House floor this year during a debate over a
bill pushed by legislative budget writers that would make it easier to seek
competitive proposals from private prison providers. "It's not
just the cost," she said. "My concern also is for the safety of the
general public, as well as the people working in, and even those confined in,
these facilities. "This is the second riot at the same facility
since 1999. These prisons are built in rural areas, where there is little law
enforcement to help out. They may not have sufficient manpower themselves,
and they may be poorly trained and equipped." But Rep. Brad Young,
R-Lamar, chairman of the legislature's budget-writing committee, noted that
prisons - both state and private - are dangerous places. He said he wants to
see a full report on what happened. "It sounds like a full-scale
riot broke out really fast," Young said. "You do everything you can
to prevent that kind of thing. It doesn't mean they weren't doing a good
job." Young said constructing prisons is "a huge cost"
and added that with the economic downturn that occurred a little more than
two years ago, "the state couldn't afford to keep up with the inmate
population increases we've seen." "There definitely is some
economy for doing it through the private sector," he said.
But McFadyen said she hoped what occurred would
help bring a better awareness of the true cost to the state and local
governments where private prisons are located. "As a state
legislator, I have frequently questioned the hard cost of contracting with
private prisons," she said. "No one can give me an exact amount.
The question is, are we risking the safety of the
public and is it really cheaper? We must have answers to those
questions." (Rocky Mountain News)

July 22, 2004
State prison officials sifted through a stunning swath of destruction at the
Crowley County Correctional Facility on Wednesday, still uncertain what
caused an overnight riot by more than 400 inmates. Officials on
Wednesday discounted reports that the riot was a "turf war" between
Colorado inmates and 190 prisoners who arrived from Washington state about
three weeks ago. But guards had privately confided to townspeople since
the Washington transfer that they feared something was brewing. The
Washington inmates were angry over their transfer more than 1,000 miles away
from their families. Whatever problem had been smoldering inside the
privately operated prison 40 miles east of Pueblo erupted violently about
7:30 p.m. Tuesday. More than one-third of the prison's 1,147 inmates
joined in the 51/2-hour riot. They set at least three fires, smashed everything
in two of the prison's five living units, damaged its three other living
units, and resisted more than 150 guards using tear gas and rubber bullets to
quell the outbreak. Thirteen inmates were injured. One suffered
multiple stab wounds in one of two inmate-on-inmate assaults. Four inmates
remained hospitalized Tuesday, none with life-threatening injuries, said
Department of Corrections Director Joe Ortiz. None of the prison staff
was injured. On Wednesday, the inmates were being held under 24-hour
lockdown in cells and improvised holding areas throughout the prison.
At the height of the riot, inmates set fires in two cell houses and the
vocational greenhouse, and proceeded to tear them apart, throwing and
smashing furniture, destroying desks and bunks, ripping sinks and toilets
from the walls, splintering television sets and setting off fire alarms to
drench everything in the buildings. Some inmates used steel weights and
dumbbells from the exercise yard to smash doors and windows, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alison Morgan.
"Living Unit 2 is not habitable. Living Unit 1 is not as severe, but it
is destroyed," Morgan said. The destruction ruined 600 inmate
cells, leaving prison officials to find other places to house them. About 300
were being moved to a newly completed housing unit at the prison, but 300
were being transferred Wednesday to other state prisons. (Rocky
Mountain News)

July 21, 2004
Inmates at a nearby private prison rioted Tuesday, prompting law enforcement
agencies from around Southern Colorado to mobilize in an effort to quell the
uprising. Crowley County Commissioner Matt Heimerich
told The Pueblo Chieftain that local sheriff's department responded to the
medium security Crowley County Correctional Facility at about 8 p.m. with
every available officer from its force of nine people, along with all three
ambulances in Crowley County. By 10 p.m. the rioting apparently had
escalated and reached a threshold of serious concern, as the Pueblo County
Sheriff's Department's SORT team and up to 20 members of the SWAT team from
the Pueblo Police Department were deployed to join in suppressing the
situation. The Fowler Police Department, Otero County Sheriff's Department,
Rocky Ford Police Department and the Colorado State Patrol also joined the
effort. Witnesses said smoke billowed from three separate locations in
the prison - one in the yard and two inside structures - and the smell of
tear gas was thick. Multiple witnesses also reported hearing gunshots from
inside the prison walls. A female guard toting a rifle was stationed at
the main entrance to the prison and turned away several curious onlookers
from the surrounding rural area. Heimerich said he
had been told the riot was being driven by inmates from the state of
Washington, who were recently transferred to the
prison in Olney Springs. The prison recently contracted to retain between 150
and 200 inmates from Washington. (Pueblo Chieftain)

July 21, 2004
At least 100 inmates rioted Tuesday evening and set small fires inside the walls
of a privately run prison in Crowley County. Scores of law-enforcement
officials from all over the state raced to Olney Springs to help quell the
disturbance. The inmates rioted in the yard and in some portions of the
interior of the Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs,
Allison Morgan, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said early
this morning. Morgan said she did not know where in the prison the fires were
set. (Rocky Mountain news)

Goshen County Economic
DevelopmentGoshen County, Wyoming
Dominion
June 5, 2003
Goshen County Economic Development (GCED) is continuing its effort in
reviewing the process for a correctional facility to be built in Wyoming,
possibly in Torrington. GCED director Brad Sutherland found out that
the Wyoming Department of Corrections has been without
director and that the state is continuing its search for that
position. The candidate highest on the list declined the job when he learned
that his wife might have cancer, according Sutherland. As far as
Sutherland knows, Dominion Correctional Services LLC,
is the only contractor out there that is serious about putting a bid in right
now. (The Torrington Telegram Online)

McKinley County Detention
Center/Adult FacilityGallup, New Mexico
Management and Training Corporation
January 24, 2006 Casper Star-Tribune
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against a New
Mexico detention officer, alleging he sexually assaulted two female inmates
from Wyoming at a Gallup, N.M., jail and photographed them in the nude. At
the time of the alleged incidents in 2003, the inmates were housed in New
Mexico because of overcrowding at Wyoming's only female correctional
institution, the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk. The lawsuit claims sexual abuse
and cruel and unusual punishment by Detention Officer Brian Orr of the
McKinley County (N.M.) Detention Center. The complaint was filed on behalf of
inmates Sheila Black and Christine Herden. The ACLU
alleges that Orr repeatedly sexually assaulted the two women and photographed
them in the nude, causing physical injury and severe psychological and
emotional distress. The complaint also alleges that the jail's acting warden,
Gilbert Lewis, the McKinley County commissioners and the Centerville, Utah,
company that managed the jail, Management and Training Corp., were negligent
for failing to properly train and supervise Orr.

CASPER, Wyoming
— An inmate who escaped on his way to the Sweetwater County jail got a head
start because the private company transporting him didn't notify authorities
for nearly an hour and a half. Kenneth James Ward fled Saturday evening after
the Inmate Services Corp. van stopped near Independence Rock for a restroom
break. Surveillance footage shows Ward ducking out of restroom and running
away. Natrona County sheriff Gus Holbrook told the Casper Star-Tribune
(http://bit.ly/17zo54K ) that the company's two guards
decided to search for Ward on their own before notifying his office. Ward was
handcuffed but was not wearing leg or bell chains, which would have slowed
him down. Authorities believe Ward hiked at least 15 miles through the night
and looped back to near the rest area.

Sep 5, 2013
trib.com

The trail
for Kenneth James Ward went cold after a 15-mile trek through Wyoming terrain
and less than a mile from where it began. Ward, until recently a Sweetwater
County fugitive, was being transferred from Nogales, Ariz., to a Sweetwater
County jail Saturday evening when the transport van stopped near Independence
Rock to let everyone use the restroom. The guards performed a head count in
the rest area parking lot afterward and realized one of the prisoners was
missing, according to Natrona County Sheriff Gus Holbrook. Later-reviewed
surveillance footage features Ward ducking out of the restroom door and
bolting. It would be nearly an hour and a half before the sheriff’s office
was notified of the escape, Holbrook said. Ward was being transported by
Inmate Services Corporation, a private company out of West Memphis, Ark., and
the two employees opted to conduct their own search before contacting
authorities, Holbrook said. Ward was handcuffed but was not wearing leg or
belly chains — two security measures Holbrook said could have prevented the
man from fleeing as far as he did. Detective Dick Blust
Jr., public information officer for the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office,
said Tuesday he was unsure whether they will employ Inmate Services
Corporation again. A representative for the company declined to comment.
Holbrook said deputies tracked Ward from the rest area Saturday evening and
into the morning. “He was probably outside that perimeter, walking away,” he
said. “By the time we got on the tracks the next morning, he’d had all night
to walk.” Officials launched land and air searches for the escapee over a
perimeter of 52 square miles on the ground and 134 miles by air. They
followed his footprints, tracking him first to Point of Rocks, a small,
mountainous area where they thought he could be hiding out, and used thermal
imaging and night vision to try and spot him. The crew continued on to
Buzzard Road until nearly completing a circle around the area. Holbrook said
Ward hiked at least 15 miles throughout the night and made a loop until he
was about three-fourths of a mile back near the Independence Rock rest area.
Officials assume he returned to the rest area, but can’t be certain. “You’ve
got to think — that’s where people are stopping to travel, garbage cans are
there for food,” Holbrook said. “There’s a plethora of reasons he would want
to go back there.” There is a payphone at the rest stop, but it can only be activated
by using a credit card. Holbrook doesn’t believe the escape was planned, but
that Ward seized an opportunity. Ward is accustomed to life on the lam. The
Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office sought Ward for three years before
learning he was hiding out in northwest Mexico. Federal law enforcement
recently contacted Mexican authorities, who apprehended Ward and deported him
back to the United States, according to an Aug. 23 media release from the
Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office. Ward, 51, was wanted for a summer 2010
felony larceny for the theft of a Ford F350 pickup, a Ranco
belly-dump trailer, two winches, a utility trailer, a Yamaha generator and
tire chains from Eaton Trucking of Farson.
According to the release, the property was valued at more than $100,000. A
single larceny charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a $10,000
fine, or both. Natrona County sheriff’s deputies remain in the Independence
Rock area 24 hours a day, Holbrook said. There have been no confirmed sitings of Ward and officials have no reason to believe
he escaped his handcuffs. Ward is described as 6 feet tall, 180 pounds and
has brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing khaki shorts, a black
shirt and flip flops, according to the sheriff’s office. Officials ask the
public to refrain from picking up hitchhikers in the area and not to attempt
to apprehend Ward if he is spotted.

October 13, 2012 JOSHUA
WOLFSON Star-Tribune staff writer
Another former inmate at Natrona County’s old juvenile detention center has filed
a federal lawsuit claiming he endured unsafe conditions and humiliating tasks
while in custody. David McGuirk alleges staff
members at the Regional Juvenile Detention Center ordered him to clean the
blood of another juvenile who attempted suicide after a 2008 sexual attack.
He also accuses Frontier Correctional Systems, the private company that
operated the facility, of housing high-risk offenders with lower-risk
juveniles. “These defendants violated their duty to McGuirk
by placing him in an environment which they knew or should have known was a
danger to his safety and welfare and put McGuirk at
great risk of harm,” the lawsuit states. The suit, which was filed in U.S.
District Court for Wyoming, also names former Wyoming Department of Family
Services Director Tony Lewis. It accuses Lewis and unknown DFS workers of
failing to properly train and monitor Frontier employees. McGuirk
suffered emotional distress as a result of his experiences during
confinement, according to the lawsuit. He is seeking unspecified damages. In
court documents, attorneys for Frontier and Lewis denied the allegations.
Frontier’s attorney, William McKellar, argued McGuirk’s
injuries were caused by someone other than the company. A woman at McKellar’s
office said he would not comment on the case Senior Assistant Attorney
General Sue Chatfield is representing Lewis. She did not respond Friday to a
message left at the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office. Casper attorney Jamie
Woolsey is representing McGuirk. She was out of the
office Friday and did not respond to a message. Frontier stopped operating
the juvenile detention center in 2008. Another private company, Cornerstone
Programs, now runs the center in a new facility next to the county’s adult
facility. The old juvenile detention center was located on the third floor of
the Hall of Justice in downtown Casper. The site had been declared
unacceptable for adult inmates before it was used to house children, the
lawsuit notes. McGuirk spent several weeks at the
center before witnessing the sexual assault in March 2008. At the time, he
was housed in cell 331 along with several juveniles, including a high-risk
offender, the lawsuit states. The suit further claims the high-risk juvenile
had a history of engaging in unusual behaviors while incarcerated, such as
stripping naked in his cell. While in that cell, McGuirk
witnessed violent sexual attacks against two boys. One of the children
attempted suicide, and McGuirk said he was ordered
by Frontier staff members to clean the victim’s blood. It was common at the
jail for juveniles to clean blood of other inmates after injuries, the suit
alleges. Sharrid Jennings, another former juvenile
inmate who spent time in cell 331, filed his own federal lawsuit earlier this
year with similar allegations. Jennings also claimed he witnessed sexual
attacks against two children and was ordered to clean blood from an assault
victim who attempted suicide. Back in 2008, the Department of Family Services
conducted its own investigation of the incident. It found an inmate had been
sexually assaulted at the center and that supervisors failed to report what
happened to either the facility’s administrators or DFS. The department also
determined staff members at the center made juveniles clean blood and vomit
in exchange for rewards of chips and sodas.

September 6, 2008 Casper
Times-TribuneThe Wyoming Department of Family Services may provide a
"Band-aid" fix for Cornerstone Programs, Inc., so the private
corrections company can continue running the Natrona County Juvenile
Detention Center. Cornerstone has been steadily losing money since it took
control of JDC operations in March because of dwindling inmate populations.
In the last two months alone, the company has sustained more than $70,000 in
operational losses alone. In a conference call Thursday that included the
county commission, Cornerstone representatives, officials from DFS and
Sheriff Mark Benton, DFS Director Tony Lewis suggested that there may be a
way to subsidize the company's losses with state grant money for at least a
few months until the situation becomes more certain. Using a company that
works on an average daily payment for each juvenile incarcerated may not be
the best decision in the future, he said, if only because DFS plans to send
fewer kids for the foreseeable future. According to DFS records, Cornerstone
is making about $20,000 less per month because of the department's policy to
send fewer juveniles. "If we're using detention the right way, the
numbers aren't going to support the contract at a good level," he said.
"I think it's a mistake to create a system where you need a quandry of kids for a private company to make money. It
was a good investment to go to the kind of standards that Cornerstone has
brought, but it's not going to be a money-making endeavor." Numbers are
down across the state, he added. The number of juveniles at the JDC from
counties such as Converse and Niobrara in December 2007 starkly contrasts
with the number in August 2008.

August 28, 2008 Casper
Star-Tribune
Cornerstone Programs, Inc., the private corrections company charged with
running the Natrona County Juvenile Detention Center, may have to terminate
its yet-to-be-signed contract with the county because of financial
difficulties, the company's CEO Joseph Newman told county commissioners
Thursday. "The drain has been significant, to the point where it has had
a huge impact on our cash flow, and, quite frankly, if the conditions
continue, we won't be able to support the operation," he said. Low
inmate population has caused the relatively small business to lose large sums
of money over about a six-month period, something the company can't sustain
for long, he said. For Cornerstone to break even on operations, the JDC must
hold an average of 25 juveniles per day. The average number of inmates over
the past month has been 18, with a one-day high of 24 inmates. In July, the
company lost about $40,000 in operational costs alone, and expects that
August will see about a $35,000 loss. At the current rate of loss, Newman
said, the company can't afford to run the facility for more than another
month or so. While an exact explanation for the decrease in population isn't
available, Gary Miller, chief operating officer for Cornerstone, said the
Department of Family Services is placing fewer than half the number of
juveniles in the facility than it had over the last five years. "There
does seem to be a reluctance on their part to refer
kids," Miller said.

February
22, 2008 The Denver Channel
The Colorado Department of Corrections has sent two investigators to an
Oklahoma prison to probe whether correctional officers staged ‘ultimate
fights’ among prisoners and rewarded the fight's winner with a cell phone,
corrections sources told CALL7 Investigators. The DOC inspector general's
staff traveled this week to the privately owned North Folk Correctional
Facility at Sayre, Okla., about 130 miles west of Oklahoma City, to
investigate the complaint of ‘ultimate fighting,’ sources said. It was unclear
Friday whether the details of the complaint have been substantiated. DOC
Executive Director Ari Zavaras, in a phone
conversation with CALL7 Investigator Tony Kovaleski,
confirmed investigators were sent out to Oklahoma. "There is an ongoing
investigation and we do not comment until the investigation is
complete," he told Kovaleski. The facility is
owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America and houses about
480 Colorado inmates on a contract basis. CCA also owns the Crowley County
Correctional Facility, which came under DOC scrutiny in 2004 after a riot.
The DOC report criticized the "lack of responsiveness" by private
prison operators to state corrections officials. CCA also owns about 70
facilities nationwide, including four in Colorado. The Colorado facilities
are Bent County Correctional Facility, Huerfano County Correctional Center,
Kit Carson Correctional Center and the facility in Crowley County. DOC
spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti declined to
confirm any details but said introducing a cell phone into a correctional
facility is a federal offense if it happened. CCA spokesman declined comment
and directed questions to Sanguinetti.

February 19, 2008 Casper
Star-Tribune
A state investigation determined Wyoming had no policies in place last year
to track violence against inmates being housed in out-of-state prisons. The
probe also found that the beating of a state inmate by other inmates at a
private prison last year in Oklahoma was not thoroughly investigated. The
investigation by Maj. William Moore of the Wyoming Department of Corrections
found "no WDOC Policy, Procedure or Directive is in place that requires
the tracking and compliance of out of state incidents to ensure that these
incident (sic) are properly tracked for compliance." The investigative
report, completed last fall, was recently obtained by The Associated Press
under the state's public records law. The investigation was launched after an
inmate was beaten last April at the private Northfork
Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla. Wyoming houses 375 inmates there and
has paid Corrections Corporation of America nearly $12.5 million from June
2006 through December 2007 for their housing and medical care. An
investigator with Corrections Corporation of America, which owns the Oklahoma
prison, looked into the inmate beating and concluded there was "no
institutional deficiency that may have contributed to the inmate on inmate
assault." The inmate, whose name was redacted from documents released to
The AP, sustained injuries in the beating and was airlifted to Oklahoma City
for treatment. He later returned to the prison that day. In his report, Moore
found the CCA prison investigator "conducted the most rudimentary of
investigations regarding this incident and what little was accomplished
focused only on the assault." Attempts to reach a spokesperson at the
Oklahoma prison were unsuccessful. An official with the Wyoming Department of
Corrections said the agency has taken steps to boost its monitoring of
out-of-state inmates since last year's report. Wyoming has a full-time
contract monitor at the Oklahoma prison and routinely sends investigative
teams to the prison to look into inmate complaints, said Steve Lindly, deputy director of the Department of Corrections.
Lindly said he doesn't doubt that Moore's report
was accurate when it was written last year. But Lindly
said state corrections officials were already independently coming to the
conclusion that more oversight of out of state inmates was necessary. Lindly said his department is satisfied the Oklahoma
prison now is meeting its obligation to ensure Wyoming inmates are protected
from assault at the Oklahoma prison. "The warden has been responsive to
our insistence that we meet the standard," Lindly
said. Stephen Pevar, an ACLU lawyer, said he
remains concerned about the safety of Wyoming inmates at the Oklahoma prison.
His lawsuit forced security improvements at the state penitentiary in
Rawlins. Last summer, U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer
of Cheyenne ended five years of federal oversight of the Rawlins prison,
which stemmed from the ACLU's lawsuit. The lawsuit was called the Skinner
case, named after inmate Brad Skinner who was beaten by three other inmates
in 1999. Although conditions have improved in Rawlins, Pevar
said he's received complaints about assaults against Wyoming inmates at the
Oklahoma prison. "All I can confirm is that there have been a number of
very egregious assaults at these facilities to which Wyoming is sending its
prisoners," Pevar said. There have been 14
confirmed inmate-on-inmate assaults last year involving Wyoming prisoners at
the Oklahoma facility, according to Melinda Brazzale,
spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department of Corrections. There were 65 assaults
in 2007 at the Rawlins state prison, which holds about 644 inmates, Brazzale said. Pevar said he's
written to the Wyoming Attorney General's office about the state's contract
with CCA. He said he's told the state that it must insist on standards
limiting inmate violence, just as it requires inmates to be given adequate
food, shelter and medical care. Pevar said believes
the state needs to ensure Wyoming prisoners, "will be adequately
protected from assault, and that the same procedures that the court held in
the Skinner case were constitutionally required should likewise be adopted in
these facilities that house Wyoming prisoners. And it's clear to me that
they're not." Pevar also said he doesn't feel
Wyoming is doing an adequate job investigating "the sufficiency of the
facilities to which Wyoming is sending its prisoners." "Those
facilities are doing some things that I don't think would be acceptable in
Wyoming," Pevar said. Lindly
said it was clear the CCA investigations into inmate violence were not as
thorough as the investigations Wyoming's own staff members would conduct and
noted the state is building a 700-bed prison in Torrington that will allow
the department to house all its inmates in state. "We're comfortable
with the process right now," Lindly said.
"It's not as good as having them under your own wing, which is why we're
having another prison built."

Regional Juvenile
Detention Facility
Natrona County, Wyoming
Cornerstone Correctional Services (formerly run by Frontier Correctional
System
June 4, 2008 AP
An investigation by the Wyoming Department of Family Services has concluded
that juveniles weren't adequately supervised when a boy allegedly was
sexually assaulted at a Casper juvenile jail a few months ago. The department
also found that staff and administrators at the Regional Juvenile Detention
Center didn't report the alleged assault to the state as required. The
Associated Press obtained the report outlining the department's conclusions
after filing an open records request with the department. The report also
concluded that youths cleaned up messes including
urine, vomit and blood, and that some youths were improperly locked up in
solitary confinement as punishment. The alleged incidents occurred while the
facility was being run by a Cheyenne company, Frontier Correctional Services.
Management of the facility is being taken over by a Colorado company,
Cornerstone Programs. Officials with the companies didn't immediately return
messages seeking comment.

April 19, 2008 APA Casper juvenile facility has been locking up youth in jail space that
was deemed unsuitable for adults years ago and in
ways that increase the risk of youths committing suicide or physically or
sexually assaulting one another, according to a report obtained Friday by The
Associated Press. The report came out three months before an assault and
other alleged incidents at the privately run Regional Juvenile Detention
Facility prompted a Department of Family Services investigation. "It is
difficult to comprehend why the community permits children to be treated
worse than adult criminals," summed up the report by the National
Partnership for Juvenile Services. Overcrowding at the adult Natrona County
jail prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the county in 1992.
The county opened a new adult jail in 1997 but then began using the old adult
jail to lock up juveniles. The Regional Juvenile Detention Facility is in the
same building as the Natrona County Sheriff's Office and houses youth from
several Wyoming counties. The alleged incidents there happened about six weeks
ago and included an assault between two boys and an instance of a group of
boys who, for unknown or undisclosed reasons, gathered around two other boys
who were naked. Department officials said this week they've been trying to
learn why staff of Cheyenne-based Frontier Correctional Systems, which runs
the center, didn't report the incidents right away. Department officials also
have been looking into whether lack of separation between bigger, more
aggressive youth and smaller, less aggressive kids may have played a role in
the incidents. The National Partnership report, dated Dec. 12, had warned
about just that. The report said the facility did not have a useful way of
identifying and separating "predatory youth" from "vulnerable
youth." The report also said that the facility's multiple-occupancy
cells made physical and sexual assault among youths more likely, and that the
number of locked doors between staff and youth reduced safety. In addition,
the report said youth in the facility on the third floor of the sheriff's
office building aren't given time outdoors -- it's not possible. "The
reasons for declaring the third floor unacceptable for detention seem
obvious," the report said. "These factors are aggravated when
detaining juveniles." The report said the juvenile facility is
"sadly inadequate for ... advanced practice care" and putting
youths there amounts to "little more than warehousing" them. It's
unclear what measures the county might have taken after the report's release
to improve safety at the facility. Sheriff Mark Benton and Undersheriff David
Kinghorn did not return messages left Friday;
neither did Frontier Correctional Systems CEO John Harrison. But Natrona
County commissioners said they were aware of the report -- they requested it
-- and feel that it underscores the need to build a new juvenile facility.
"It's indefensible, in my opinion, that we put kids in a facility that's
inadequate for adults. I can't defend that. I wouldn't want to," said
Commissioner Matt Keating. "But what I do want to do is move the project
forward as best I can, to have an appropriate facility, so that we end up
with better adults."

Riverton,
WyomingDominion
November 6, 2002
The Riverton Economic and Community Development Association has unanimously endorsed
looking into locating a 400-bed medium security prison in the area. The Joint
Judiciary Committee of the Wyoming Legislature indicated in October it would
recommend building two 400-bed medium security prisons in Wyoming, one in the
east half of the state and one in the west, rather than a single facility to
replace the Wyoming Business Council, told Riverton Economic and Community
Development Association, RECDA, members that two top executives of Dominion
Properties LLC, of Edmond, Okla., visited the city two weeks ago "to get
the lay of the land." A Dominion-operated correctional facility in
Crowley County, Colo., is holding about 500 Wyoming prisoners now. Jim
Hunter, executive vice president of Dominion Properties, the parent company
of Dominion Corrections, said company officials like what they see in
Riverton. Hunter said his company would only design, build and equip the new
prison if it wins a state contract. "It is our understanding that the
state of Wyoming has every intention of owning and operating the prison.
We'll just find a location for it and build it," he said.

Rolling Plains
Regional Jail and Detention Center
Haskell, Texas
Emerald CorrectionsApril
14, 2007 APThe return of 40 inmates from Texas means that all of Wyoming's female inmates
now are being housed in-state, for the first time in eight years. The women
were transferred Tuesday to the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk from the
private Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention Center in Haskell, Texas,
according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. A recent expansion nearly
doubled the number of beds at the Women's Center to 294. The expansion
increased the prison's size by nearly half; it also built a commercial fish
farm and doubled the number of beds for substance abuse treatment. The
project marked one of the biggest steps yet in the state's goal of housing
all of its inmates - female and male - in Wyoming. Wyoming still has 457 male
inmates at three out-of-state prisons: 384 at the private North Fork
Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla.; 45 at the private Rolling Plains
facility; and 28 at the public West Texas Detention Center, in Sierra Blanca,
Texas. Corrections officials hope to return all of the state's male inmates
to Wyoming when a medium-security prison is completed in Torrington in the
summer of 2009. If that goal is met, it would end a dozen years of housing
inmates out of state.

April 18, 2006 APTwo Wyoming inmates have been recaptured after escaping from a Texas jail
over the weekend, according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. Joe
Wilkinson, 41, gave himself up about two hours after the escape Saturday and
didn't get very far from the Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention
Center in Haskell, Texas, corrections spokeswoman Melinda Brazzale
said Monday. Robert Dix, 25, was arrested Sunday night, about 34 hours after
the escape. He, too, didn't get far from the prison. Haskell is about 50
miles north of Abilene, Texas. Wyoming keeps many of its inmates there
because it doesn't have enough room for them at prisons in Wyoming.

Wardle Academy
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Frontier Correctional Services
September 9, 2007 APYoungsters sentenced to jail time intermingled with -- and beat up --
youth undergoing drug and alcohol treatment at a privately run facility, Department
of Family Services Director Tony Lewis told Gov. Dave Freudenthal's
chief of staff. Lewis told Chris Boswell in a July 30 e-mail that the
department was about to withdraw youngsters from the Jeffrey C. Wardle
Academy in Cheyenne and was ending its youth treatment contract with Frontier
Correctional Services, which operates the facility. The Associated Press
obtained the e-mail Thursday through an open records request with the
governor's office and the Department of Family Services. "Over the past
year, a number of the treatment kids have been victimized and beaten by
short-term detention kids," Lewis wrote in the e-mail. "We've also
documented abuses by staff and numerous clinic and medical treatment
deficiencies. "These are well-documented in special
investigation findings by our child protection and licensing staff,"
Lewis wrote. Attorney General Pat Crank was included in the e-mail
correspondence, but his brief messages to Lewis were redacted in the copy
given to AP. The governor's spokeswoman, Cara Eastwood, said the reason was
attorney-client privilege, an exception included in Wyoming's open records
law. Department officials disclosed last week that, on a judge's orders, 24
of 28 youths are being removed from the treatment center at Wardle Academy
and placed in other programs. All 24 are expected to be moved by month's end.
The rest were being allowed to stay because they were close to finishing
their stints. Frontier Correctional Systems CEO John Harrison said that for
seven years, the department issued licenses for the Wardle Academy that
permitted the mingled populations, and that no fights occurred. "In
seven years, we never had an assault between a residential treatment and a
juvenile detention student," he said. But he said fights had occurred
within the last few months. Lewis opened his e-mail to Boswell with "a
political heads up" that Frontier Correctional Services could be
expected to tell judges and county officials that, without the treatment
contract, the company would have to close the Wardle Academy. If the facility
closed, Lewis pointed out, that would leave Laramie County without a place to
jail juveniles without resorting to putting them in the county jail. The
Wardle Academy jailed a total of 395 juveniles in 2006, according to figures complied for the Department of Family Services by the
Wyoming County Commissioners Association. Lewis said the department's
treatment contract with Frontier Correctional Systems provides "half or
a little more than half" of Wardle Academy's income. The contract was
for $281,881 a month, according to department spokeswoman Juliette Rule.
Harrison said the Wardle Academy would not close. "We will continue to
operate as a juvenile detention and assessment and evaluation residential
treatment center without the state contract," he said. "We are in
agreement that we do not want the contract under the same terms and
conditions that we had been operating under this pilot project." As for
allowing youngsters who were sentenced to jail to mingle with youngsters
undergoing treatment, Rule said that didn't violate department policy. But
she said such commingling isn't accepted as a "best practice" in
social services. In an interview with AP on Tuesday, Lewis detailed several
concerns the department has had with the Wardle Academy, including
allegations that youngsters in treatment had access to drugs and that medical
care, meals and laundry often were neglected. Lewis said much the same thing
in his e-mail to Boswell. He said there were "well-documented"
abuses by staff and deficiencies in medical treatment. He wrote that problems
continued even after a year and a half of meetings with Frontier Correctional
Systems officials and the company's CEO, Harrison. "While they have
shown improvements in some areas, they don't seem to be able to get over the
hurdle of operating the institution as anything more than a jail, which they
do well enough," he wrote.

Wyoming
Department of CorrectionsCorrectional Medical Services, Prison Health Services, Wexford
April 14, 2007 APThe return of 40 inmates from Texas means that all of Wyoming's female
inmates now are being housed in-state, for the first time in eight years. The
women were transferred Tuesday to the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk from the
private Rolling Plains Regional Jail and Detention Center in Haskell, Texas,
according to the Wyoming Department of Corrections. A recent expansion nearly
doubled the number of beds at the Women's Center to 294. The expansion
increased the prison's size by nearly half; it also built a commercial fish
farm and doubled the number of beds for substance abuse treatment. The
project marked one of the biggest steps yet in the state's goal of housing
all of its inmates - female and male - in Wyoming. Wyoming still has 457 male
inmates at three out-of-state prisons: 384 at the private North Fork
Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla.; 45 at the private Rolling Plains
facility; and 28 at the public West Texas Detention Center, in Sierra Blanca,
Texas. Corrections officials hope to return all of the state's male inmates
to Wyoming when a medium-security prison is completed in Torrington in the
summer of 2009. If that goal is met, it would end a dozen years of housing
inmates out of state.

July 16, 2006 APA few weeks ago, the state of Wyoming paid $50,000 to settle a federal
lawsuit in which an inmate at the state prison at Rawlins charged he had been
denied adequate medical care. This week, another inmate has filed a federal
lawsuit claiming that he, too, was denied adequate medical treatment by the
same doctor and private medical services company at the Rawlins prison. In a
federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, inmate Craig Blumhagen,
50, charges that medical staff at the Rawlins prison refused his requests for
treatment of pain and vomiting he suffered over several months in 2003. Blumhagen names Dr. John Coyle and Correctional Medical
Services, a Missouri company, as defendants in the case, together with state
corrections department personnel. Correctional Medical Services held the
contract to provide medical services at the prison for six years before
losing the contract to a competitor last summer. Blumhagen's
lawsuit charges that Coyle began prescribing Blumhagen
daily doses of ibuprofen for treatment of back pain in 1999, at which time Blumhagen weighed about 150 pounds. In May 2003,
according to the lawsuit, Blumhagen told Coyle and
others that he was experiencing nausea and abdominal pain. The lawsuit states
that a nurse at the prison told Blumhagen in August
2003 that Coyle wasn't going to treat his pain and that he should,
"grieve in your heart and get over it." By December 2003, the
lawsuit claims, Blumhagen was down to 110 pounds
and frequently vomiting brown material that looked like coffee grounds. The
lawsuit states that Coyle noted that month that Blumhagen's
request for narcotic pain medication was evidence of "continued
drug-seeking behavior." Blumhagen is serving
prison time on drug charges out of Laramie County. The lawsuit states that Blumhagen collapsed in late December and that a guard in
the prison infirmary called for an ambulance to take him to the emergency
room at Memorial Hospital in Rawlins. A surgeon at the hospital determined
that Blumhagen was suffering from severe ulcer, the
lawsuit states. Medical staff at the hospital transfused Blumhagen
with red blood cells to raise his hemoglobin level before surgery to address
the ulcer. The lawsuit says hospital staff told Blumhagen
that his long-term use of ibuprofen was the probable cause of his ulcer and
that he could no longer use such medications. Bruce Moats, a Cheyenne lawyer
representing Blumhagen, said Friday that prison
inmates are incarcerated to serve their time, "not to be denied proper
medical care when they get sick." "The care that my client has
received did not live up to the standards of humanity and decency required by
the law, and adhered to by the people of Wyoming," Moats said.

June 21, 2006 Billings
GazetteThe State of Wyoming has paid $50,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought
by a former Wyoming prison inmate who blamed the state Department of
Corrections and a private company that provided medical care to inmates for
the loss of his lower right leg. Salvatore Lucido,
a diabetic, filed the lawsuit in April 2004 charging that he developed sores
on his feet when the staff at the state prison in Rawlins refused to give him
appropriate shoes. Diabetics often have poor blood circulation in their feet,
which means that injuries may be slow to heal and prone to infection. Lucido contended that prison officials and Correctional
Medical Services, a private company that provided health care to inmates,
delayed taking him to a hospital where his foot might have been saved. The
lawsuit states that the officials hoped that if they delayed getting Lucido medical care, "that his release date of April
23 (2003) would arrive before it became too apparent that hospitalization
could not be delayed any longer." The lawsuit states that prison
officials took Lucido to a hospital on April 18, 2003, more than three weeks after a nurse had noted that
he needed emergency surgery to try to save his foot. The lawsuit states that
he was taken to the hospital "after his foot literally exploded from the
infection and swelling." His lower right leg was amputated on May 2,
2003. U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson has scheduled a trial to start Tuesday
in Lucido's remaining claims against Correctional
Medical Services and Dr. John Coyle. The lawsuit states Coyle provided
medical services for inmates at the state prison. An independent audit last
year found that some inmates hadn't receive timely
health care because of record-keeping problems caused mainly by changes in
the private contractors. Correctional Medical Services, a Missouri company,
had held the contract to provide inmate health services at the Rawlins prison
for six years before losing the contract to a competitor, Prison Health
Services, last summer. Linda Burt, executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union in Wyoming, said Wednesday that her office continues to get
many complaints from inmates at the Rawlins prison about health care,
particularly from inmates who are diabetic. "I don't think you can do
(prison) medical care privately and do a good job, and I don't think you can
do it for profit and do a good job," Burt said. "It's extraordinarily
difficult, and I haven't seen any success in that area."

November 21, 2005 AP
A project that will nearly double the size of the Wyoming Women's Center
includes the construction of an aquaculture facility for raising tilapia. The
prison, which opened in 1984, was built for 84 inmates but now houses 106.
The $17.3 million expansion will add 140 beds, enabling the Wyoming
Department of Corrections to return to Wyoming 78 inmates it has been housing
in a private prison in Haskell, Texas. Because of overcrowding, nearly 600
prisoners, or about 30 percent of the state total, are held at county jails
in Wyoming or private prisons in Texas.

September 19, 2005 Casper
Star-Tribune
Wyoming Department of Corrections officials hope a new $10 million-a-year contract
with Prison Health Services will save them some health care costs in the long
run. Unlike the department's previous contract with Correctional Medical
Services, the new private health care provider will be an umbrella entity
responsible for all medical, dental and health services and other programs
for the state's four penal institutions. Prison Health Services of Brentwood,
Tenn., will subcontract for some of these services and also assumes 100
percent of the risk with no caps on catastrophic claims. PHS, like CMS and
another predecessor, Wexford, has its critics. The May 2005 issue of Prison
Legal News said PHS has been the target of lawsuits over inmate health care
in New York, New Jersey, Nevada and Florida. Linda Burt, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union for Wyoming, said the volume of health care
complaints from inmates has remained the same from Wexford through CMS and
now to PHS. "It's still one of our big concerns," Burt said. She
said she looks carefully at all private prison providers. "Nothing has
ever shown me that private providers in the prison system work well. It
doesn't matter whether they are private providers of the entire prison or
just health care," she said. She noted that both Wexford and PHS also
were sued. "I think
the solution is an in-house solution," she added. "If you're
working for profit in that kind of system, you can't provide the appropriate
care and be a for-profit system. I think it's almost impossible to do
that."

November 25, 2003
Wyoming prison inmates being housed in Colorado could be heading for Texas in
coming months, Wyoming Department of Corrections (DOC) officials announced
Monday. DOC Director Robert Lampert said his
agency is trying to negotiate a contract for about 200 inmate beds in Texas,
because Colorado's corrections department wants to use the beds in its state
to house its own inmates. Due to a shortage of in-state prison space,
Wyoming has 300 male inmates in Colorado at two private facilities and 126
men being housed with the Nevada Department of Corrections, according to
Melinda Brazzale, DOC spokeswoman. The department
also has 55 women in a private facility in Colorado. "We have been
informed by the Colorado Department of Corrections that they will need all
male prison beds in Colorado (including those in privately run prisons) for
their own inmates by the middle of next year," Lampert
said in a press release. "We need to find good alternative housing for
our inmates by early 2004." He announced the negotiations during a
meeting of human resources department heads in Gov. Dave Freudenthal's
office. Freudenthal replied that he and
legislators are looking into exactly what it may cost Wyoming to build more
of its own prison space. Officials speak of $125 million as a
placeholder for such a project, but Freudenthal
said representatives of the executive and legislative branches hope to refine
that number sometime soon. Lampert, who took
the DOC helm two weeks ago, said he has also met with community leaders who
inquire about the possibilities of siting new
prison buildings in their towns. Wyoming is negotiating with
Correctional Services Corp. to house state inmates at a facility in
Littlefield, Texas, about 40 miles northwest of Lubbock, according to Brazzale. (Star-Tribune)

June 3, 2003
The state is getting close to announcing the private provider that will
furnish up to 100 substance abuse treatment beds for Wyoming male prison
inmates. Les Pozsgi, who is monitor of the
program for the Department of Corrections, said the state is still in the
negotiation stages for the final contract. He said three private groups
applied for the project and one was selected as preferred after a review
process. The treatment beds are a key part of the comprehensive $25
million substance abuse plan embodied in House Bill 59, which was
passed by the 2002 Legislature. Another part of the bill expands drug
courts. Wyoming now has seven adult and six juvenile drug courts. Evanston
has the oldest drug court in the state. Also effective July 1 this year
is the Addicted Offenders Accountability Act adopted in 2002 to require
judges to get substance abuse assessments of defendants convicted of a
felony. The law gives judges the option of sending offenders for
treatment rather than prison. (Star-Tribune capital bureau)

November 22, 2002
The Department of Corrections can make money for the state by housing 205
inmates from Wyoming at the high Desert Correctional Center, legislators
decided Thursday. The Legislator's Interim Finance Committee approved
the plan under which Wyoming will pay $2.7 million, or about $60 a day per
inmate, to send its prisoners to Nevada for seven months starting in
December. Jackie Crawford, the Corrections Department director, said it
costs the state about $39 a day to care for prisoners, including $8 a day for
medical costs. Crawford said if the prisoner-for-pay program works,
Wyoming could ship as many as 500 inmates to Nevada. "The contract
will provide a good return to Nevada," she said. "This is a
great opportunity for us to get revenue." Assembly members Morse Arberry, D-North Las Vegas, and Chris Giunchigliani,
D-Las Vegas, voted against the program. They were concerned because
Crawford wants to hire five new correctional officers for the program.
Crawford said she told Wyoming that 21 correctional officers would be
assigned to the program. Because of a state hiring freeze and budget
cutbacks, Crawford said she does not have enough available officers.
(Review Journal.com)

September 25,
2002
The state might be forced to move its prison inmates elsewhere if Colorado's
prison population continues to grow, state corrections officials said.
In a letter to Wyoming Department of Corrections Director Judith Uphoff, Colorado corrections officials said they expect
to use all of the state's available medium-security prison beds within the
next 12 to 18 months. More than 500 Wyoming inmates are housed at
Colorado's Crowley County Correctional Facility and Kit Carson Correctional
Facility. (AP)

Wyoming Legislature
March 13, 2006 Star-TribuneWyoming’s legislators form a citizen’s legislature ordinary people, who
like yourself and your neighbors, work for a living and strive to do what’s
best for the people of Wyoming, within the confines of the state and United
States Constitutions. Because Wyoming legislators put on their pants (or
pantyhose) one leg at a time, they don’t necessarily come up with ideas for
legislation all on their own, out of their own fertile imaginations.
Sometimes they get help, from local and national sources, some of which might
surprise Wyoming citizens. According to Wyoming legislators and legislative
staff, there are several organizations out there that provide research, data
and even model legislation to legislatures and legislators throughout the
country. • The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bipartisan
membership association for conservative state lawmakers, to advance the
“Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and
individual liberty.” Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973 by
Paul Weyrich, who also helped found the
conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the Moral Majority and the
Council for National Policy. ALEC, which claims 2,400 legislator members,
charges legislators $100 per biennium to join (constituting less than 2
percent of the annual budget), but then charges corporations (over 300) and
associations graduated memberships at $5,000; $10,000; $25,000 and $50,000 to
sit at the table with legislators and craft “model” legislation. Corporate
funds underwrite travel scholarships, by which legislators and their families
can attend national meetings. ALEC’s corporate members have a keen interest
in the bills that they craft. For example, model legislation for "three
strikes" and "minimum sentencing" -- laws to keep convicted
criminals in prison longer was partially crafted by the Corrections
Corporation of America, the nation's largest private prison organization,
when it sat on ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force. The odds are fairly even,
that if you ask your state legislator whether he or she is a member of the
American Legislative Exchange Council, the answer will be “Yes.” (Of course,
every member of the Wyoming Legislature and Legislative Service Office is a
member of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Council of
State Governments, by virtue of being elected to or employed by the Wyoming
Legislature.) The trouble is, ALEC itself and Rep. Pete Illoway,
R-Cheyenne (a member of ALEC’s national board of directors) won’t tell you
who is a member of ALEC. Illoway did say that of
Wyoming’s 90 state legislators, close to half are
members of ALEC, but he refused to provide a list, though he said he has both
Republican and Democratic members. Interviewed earlier this week in his
office, Rep. Illoway said he took great offense of
a letter that had appeared that morning in the Casper Star Tribune, from
Brett Glass. Glass, an Internet access provider in Wyoming, charged that
“ALEC drafts "model" bills which favor its corporate sponsors. It
then encourages state legislators to introduce the bills in their home
states. This year's concealed weapons bill, for example, contains language
from ALEC's "Concealed Carry Outright Recognition Act," while the
"duty to retreat" bill was based on ALEC's "Castle Doctrine
Act" (as in, "a man's home is his castle"). Both were drafted
by a committee chaired by a lobbyist from Wal-Mart, the world's largest
retailer of firearms and ammunition. A bill which would have increased tobacco
taxes, and used the proceeds to fund substance-abuse prevention, was opposed
strongly by legislators and lobbyists involved with ALEC -- none of whom were
registered as lobbying for the group.” Illoway said
he’s used model legislation from ALEC once eight years ago n a bill against
the Kyoto global warming treaty. “I haven’t used a model bill since then,” he
said. He said he didn’t know of any ALEC-oriented bills introduced this
session, although an ALEC Report Card said five such bills had been
introduced and one passed into law. (ALEC headquarters did not respond to a
request about what those bills were.) Illoway said
that as a conservative and as “an anti-tax guy,” he enjoys going to ALEC
conferences mostly to interact with other like-minded legislators from around
the country.

January
19, 2003The location of two new medium-security
prisons will be up to

the company that gets the contract, if the
prison construction bill passes the Legislature as written.That will "de-politicize" the
site selection process, said Sen. John Hanes, R-Cheyenne, the chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee.Site
selection and acquisition for the two new 400-bed medium-security prisons
will be part of the request for proposals for design, and for total costs of
construction, equipment and financing, the way Senate File 16 reads now.Wasserburger said
the bill was drafted for two medium-security prisons rather than one big one
when the committee learned the two communities with
enough population to staff a large institution weren't interested. (The
Star-Tribune)

January
18, 2003
The Senate Judiciary Committee began studying a bill Friday that calls for
building two medium-security prisons and adding to the state's existing
correctional facilities. The goal of the bill is to wean Wyoming from
relying on prisons outside the state, especially for the medium-security
inmates who have been shipped to Colorado and elsewhere since the north unit
of the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins was closed in 2001. (AP)

Wyoming State Penitentiary
Prison Health Services (formerly run by Correctional Medical Services)
April 10, 2007 APA Missouri company that was responsible for providing health care to
inmates at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins wants a federal judge to
toss out a lawsuit in which an inmate claims he was denied necessary
treatment. Inmate Craig Blumhagen charges in his
federal lawsuit that medical workers with Correctional Medical Services
denied his requests for treatment of pain and vomiting for several months in
2003. CMS held the contract to provide medical services at the prison for six
years before losing the contract to a competitor in 2005. Back-pain
prescription: Blumhagen, who is serving prison
sentences for drug offenses from Laramie County, claimed in his lawsuit that
Dr. John Coyle, a doctor at the prison, began prescribing him daily doses of
ibuprofen for back pain in 1999. At that time, the suit states, Blumhagen weighed about 150 pounds. In May 2003,
according to the lawsuit, Blumhagen told Coyle that
he was experiencing nausea and abdominal pain. Blumhagen's
lawsuit states that Coyle dismissed his requests for narcotic pain medication
as "continued drug-seeking behavior." In December 2003, the lawsuit
states, Blumhagen was down
to about 110 pounds when he collapsed and was taken to the emergency room at
Memorial Hospital in Rawlins. A surgeon at the hospital determined that Blumhagen was suffering from a severe ulcer. Hospital
staff told Blumhagen that his long-term use of
ibuprofen was the probable cause of his ulcer and that he could no longer use
such medications, the lawsuit states. Headed to trial: Blumhagen's
lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial next month before U.S. Judge Alan Johnson
in Cheyenne. Besides seeking damages from CMS, the lawsuit names state corrections
officials as defendants. CMS filed papers in February asking Johnson to throw
out the lawsuit. The company stated there were no issues of material fact in
dispute in the case. Johnson held a hearing on the company's request Monday
in Cheyenne but didn't immediately announce a ruling on the request. Lawyer
Scott Ortiz argued that the case against CMS, Coyle and Stephen Noyes, a
physician's assistant with CMS, should be dismissed. Ortiz said that Coyle
had to consider Blumhagen's past drug use and drug-seeking
behavior in deciding what to prescribe. "He's trying to be judicious in
his use of narcotics at the same time looking for other answers," Ortiz
said of Coyle. Ortiz said Blumhagen told Coyle that
the pain centered in his lower back and sometimes his pelvis. Ortiz said
Coyle had no reports of pain in the upper stomach area, where the ulcer was
ultimately found. "They were being misled, honestly misled, by a disease
process," Ortiz said of the health care workers. Ortiz said that Coyle
and Noyes were responsible for knowing that long-term use of ibuprofen can
result in ulcers, but he said there's no evidence they were being
deliberately indifferent to Blumhagen's suffering.
Megan Hayes, lawyer for Blumhagen, said there are
indeed factual disagreements in the case. She said Blumhagen
disputes the defendants' characterization of the lawsuit "as one of
misdiagnosis." Hayes said it's not a complicated medical case.
"This is a case where Mr. Blumhagen was
prescribed high doses of ibuprofen for four years," she said. While
Hayes said the CMS officials didn't believe Blumhagen's
complaints of vomiting, she said they took no steps to verify whether it was
actually happening. "It's just hard to fathom why Mr. Blumhagen submitted so many requests for health care if
he hadn't been seriously medically ill," Hayes said.

December
7, 2005 Casper Star-Tribune
An independent audit of health care provided to inmates at the Wyoming State
Penitentiary blamed problems in timeliness and record keeping on the process
of changing private contractors. Prison Health Services took over medical and
mental health services for the Department of Corrections in July with a low
bid of $10.5 million per year. Correctional Medical Services had provided
health services to the state's penal institutions for the previous six years.
In October, two former Wyoming State Penitentiary nurses, KarranBedwell and Debra Long, claimed they were fired
because they complained about inadequate staffing and training by PHS at the
Rawlins prison for men. They contended the standard of care went downhill at
the penitentiary since the Tennessee-based private contractor took over. The
independent audit team found that of 185 new admissions for the quarter, only
63 -- or 34 percent -- were screened within the 24-hour required time period.
For the remaining 65.9 percent, it took as long as 27 to 30 days before the
intake screening was completed in some cases. "This is
unacceptable," the report said. The team also found unacceptable delays
in the physical assessments of new inmates by a physician's assistant. While
142 or 76.8 percent of the new admissions received physical assessments
within the required seven days, it took up to 28 days for the remainder, the
report said. Because of poor record-keeping of the sick call logs, the
consultants could not determine how long it took from the time inmate health
care requests were received until the time they were seen by health care
providers, the report said.

October
31, 2005 Casper Star Tribune
Two former Wyoming State Penitentiary nurses claim they were fired because
they complained about inadequate staffing and training at the Rawlins prison
for men. KarranBedwell
and Debra Long said the Nursing Practice Act compels them to report
inadequate health care. "It's our responsibility to do that," Bedwell said in an interview. They said the standards of
care have gone downhill at the penitentiary since Prison Health Services, a
Tennessee-based private contractor, took over medical and mental health
services for all the state's penal institutions on July 1. Before that
Correctional Medical Services held the main contract for the past six years,
and Wexford Health Sources held the contract for the two intensive substance
abuse treatment units since 1995. "One of the poorest things about them
is when they hire someone they don't even orient them but put them right on
the floor," Bedwell said. "That is really
scary for someone who's never been in a prison before." Bedwell, a registered nurse, said she was the continuous
quality improvement administrator for all the state prisons when Correctional
Medical Services had the contract. She said was given no reason for her
discharge by Prison Health Services administrators Sept. 7, but she believes
it was "because I made too much noise." Long, a licensed practical
nurse who has worked at the penitentiary for eight years off and on, said she
was promoted by Prison Health Services to the job of continuous quality
improvement nurse, a position she didn't apply for. After she told administrators
about her concerns about the delivery of care, she was told she would be
removed from the supervisory position because Prison Health Services wanted a
registered nurse in that slot. Instead, the company offered her a position
that required working nights. Long said she didn't quit but was essentially
forced out in late September when Prison Health Services administrators
refused to offer her alternate positions that she suggested. Staffing, she
said, "affects everything. If you don't have enough nurses, things
aren't going to get done in a timely manner." For example, National
Commission on Correctional Health Care guidelines, which are monitored by the
U.S. Department of Justice, require nurses to see an
inmate who submits a request for health care within 48 hours. One of Long's
jobs was to monitor the nurse sick call. During the last week in August, she
said, the inmates were being seen within 48 hours only 20 percent of the
time. "That was one of the things I was bringing to their attention,"
Long said. The prison also fell short of guidelines that require new inmates
to receive health screenings within 24 hours of admission. Because of the
staffing problems, inmates sometimes didn't get their night medications until
2 a.m., Long said. Of five private contractors who bid on the contract,
Prison Health Services submitted the lowest bid of $10.5 million for one year
with two 1-year options to renew.

May
4, 2004
Salvatore Lucido walks without too noticeable a
limp, considering that he's had his new prosthetic leg for just two weeks, he
said Monday. The first two artificial limbs he had last year didn't
work, he said. So since November, Lucido got
around either on crutches or in a wheelchair. Had it not been for the
negligence and cost-cutting by medical and other officials at the Wyoming
State Penitentiary in early 2003, he still would be walking on two legs,
he said during an interview at the office of his attorney, John Robinson, in
Casper. On Friday, Lucido filed a federal
civil rights lawsuit against former Department of Corrections Director Judy Uphoff, and prison officials and employees, according to
the complaint filed in federal court. The other defendants are Correctional
Medical Services, Inc., of Missouri; Lucido was
scheduled for release from prison on April 23, 2003, and the defendants hoped
that his foot would not need hospitalization until after that, according
to the complaint. "On April 18th, more than three weeks after a
nurse noted that Lucido needed emergency
surgery to try and save his foot, defendants gave in and took him to a
hospital after his foot literally exploded from the infection and
swelling," according to the complaint. Nothing could be done then
except to amputate his blackened foot and lower leg, according to the
complaint. (Casper Star Tribune)